A new way of looking at a misunderstood disease is revolutionizing treatments and transforming lives.
Category: neuroscience – Page 292
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ABSTRACT: Optogenetics has been widely expanded to enhance or suppress neuronal activity and it has been recently applied to glial cells. Here, we will discuss about a novel approach based on selective expression of melanopsin, a G-protein-coupled photopigment, in astrocytes. We will show the selective expression of melanopsin in astrocytes allows triggering astrocytic Ca2+ signalling, but also studying astrocyte–neuron networks and the behavioral astrocytic contribution.\
Chair and introduction: Dr. Letizia Mariotti (CNR — Institute of Neuroscience)
Dr Robert Sapolsky is a Professor at Stanford University, a world-leading researcher, and an author. Stress is an inevitable part of human life. But what is stress actually doing to the human body when it happens for such a prolonged period of time? And what does science say are the best interventions to defeat it? Expect to learn the crucial difference between short term and long term stress, how stress actually impacts the human system, the neurodevelopmental consequences of stress and poverty, how to detrain your dopamine sensitivity, what everyone doesn’t understand about how hormones work, whether believing in free will is a useful world view, why there is a relationship between belief in free will and obesity and much more…
The pursuit of rewards can lead to addiction and insensitivity to pleasure, but managing neurochemistry and focusing on the process can help achieve fulfillment and reduce addiction.
Questions to inspire discussion.
What can the pursuit of rewards lead to?
—The pursuit of rewards can lead to addiction and insensitivity to pleasure.
Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist who is Chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic at Stanford University and an author. Dopamine is a key neurotransmitter in our reward pathway. It tells us when to feel pleasure and pain, it can cause depression and anxiety, and it’s being hijacked by the modern world. Phones, video games, porn, food, our world is filled with cheap dopamine, which in turn is making us miserable. Expect to learn how dopamine creates a see-saw balance of pleasure and pain, why cravings to use your phone are driven by dopamine, the truth about dopamine detoxing, how to reset your brain’s dopamine balance, the most successful interventions for changing your relationship to dopamine long term and much more…
Wire-thin probes inserted into the brains of living people show the parts played by individual neurons.
Quantifying the ‘complexity’ of consciousness can tell us how rich our experiences are.
Developing predictive mechanistic models in biology is challenging. Elektrum uses neural architecture search, kinetic models and transfer learning to discover CRISPR–Cas9 cleavage kinetics, achieving high performance and biophysical interpretability.
The idea that consciousness requires a self has been around since at least Descartes. But problems of infinite regress, neuroscientific studies, and psychedelic experiences point to a different reality. ‘You’ may not be what you seem to be, writes James Cooke.
We typically feel like we are the conscious subject, the one who has experiences. Look around you in this moment and direct your attention to different objects. It can feel like we exist in our heads, behind our eyes, directing a spotlight of attention in order to wilfully make things conscious. This intuitive model of the mind has often been imported into the science and philosophy of consciousness, leading to confusion in our understanding of the true nature of experience. This subject is not the bodily organism, it is something that is felt to live inside us, the possessor of the body, the “you” that is reading these words now. Consciousness is very much a property of the bodily subject, but not of the conscious subject that is felt to live in our heads.
Thinking in terms of conscious subjects was present at the very origins of the scientific method, in the work of Rene Descartes saw the natural world as unconscious mechanism. Humans alone were conceived of as being conscious by virtue of a transcendent subject that could illuminate our experience of the world [1]. If we want to understand consciousness, however, postulating the existence of an inherently conscious subject merely passes the buck of explanation. What makes that conscious subject conscious? If it is intrinsically conscious then consciousness has not been explained. If not, then what makes it conscious, another subject within it? With this logic we end up in an infinite regress, with consciousness never being explained. This view of the mind has been dubbed the Cartesian Theatre by philosopher Daniel Dennett [2].