Lifeboat Foundation

A significant step toward improved accessibility.

Neuroscientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine developed a new test to identify a sign of Alzheimer’s disease neurodegeneration in a blood sample, according to a press release.

“At present, diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease requires neuroimaging,” said senior author Thomas Karikari, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry at Pitt.

Continue reading “Neuroscientists developed a blood-based biomarker for Alzheimer’s diagnosis” »

Cognitive science sees the brain as a sort of computer, but how does education redesign these cerebral computers? Cognitive scientist, philosopher, and expert on consciousness Daniel Dennett explains.
Watch the Q&A: https://youtu.be/0GJa0xKKSOU
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Buy Daniel Dennet’s most recent book “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds” — https://geni.us/4pTW46

Continue reading “If Brains are Computers, Who Designs the Software? — with Daniel Dennett” »

Ubik radio ads by Kobi LaCroix. Inspired by the Philip K. Dick novel “Ubik” (1969).

Kobi was nominated for a Logan Award for comedy music for his song “We Are The Vikings.” He was also featured on the Weird Al tribute album “Twenty-Six And A Half.” His music has been featured several times on the Dementia Top Twenty, Dementia Radio, the Mad Music Archive, and Dr. Demento. His website is at www.zencavern.com

Using this approach, researchers can map how light spreads in opaque environments.

Depression is a difficult illness. Not only does it make you feel like crap, but like so many primarily mental illnesses, it also comes with a bucketful of misinformation and misconceptions surrounding it. Even medical specialists, whom you’d expect to be the authorities on the matter, are stumped by some aspects of the disease – the truth is, while humanity may be more informed than ever on matters of the brain, we still really don’t know what’s going on inside of it when it glitches like this.

But that may soon change. Researchers based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, claim to have developed what they call a “mood decoder” – a way of reading people’s emotional state just from looking at brain activity.

“This is the first demonstration of successful and consistent mood decoding of humans in these brain regions,” Baylor College neurosurgeon and project lead Sameer Sheth told MIT Technology Review. And the best part? The team have also found a way to stimulate a positive mood in patients’ brains.

Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives: Bioelectrical pattern memories, regeneration, and synthetic living organisms.

A key question for basic biology and regenerative medicine concerns the way in which evolution exploits physics toward adaptive form and function. While genomes specify the molecular hardware of cells, what algorithms enable cellular collectives to reliably build specific, complex, target morphologies? Our lab studies the way in which all cells, not just neurons, communicate as electrical networks that enable scaling of single-cell properties into collective intelligences that solve problems in anatomical feature space. By learning to read, interpret, and write bioelectrical information in vivo, we have identified some novel controls of growth and form that enable incredible plasticity and robustness in anatomical homeostasis. In this talk, I will describe the fundamental knowledge gaps with respect to anatomical plasticity and pattern control beyond emergence, and discuss our efforts to understand large-scale morphological control circuits. I will show examples in embryogenesis, regeneration, cancer, and synthetic living machines. I will also discuss the implications of this work for not only regenerative medicine, but also for fundamental understanding of the origin of bodyplans and the relationship between genomes and functional anatomy.

Junior Division.

Individual Documentary.

NHD 2020

Gate’s team of scientists observed genetic changes in the CSF immune cells in older healthy individuals that made the cells appear more activated and inflamed with advanced age.

“The immune cells appear to be a little angry in older individuals,” Gate said. “We think this anger might make these cells less functional, resulting in dysregulation of the brain’s immune system.”

In the cognitively impaired group, inflamed T-cells cloned themselves and flowed into the CSF and brain as if they were following a radio signal, Gate said. Scientists found the cells had an overabundance of a cell receptor — CXCR6 — that acts as an antenna. This receptor receives a signal — CXCL16 — from the degenerating brain’s microglia cells to enter the brain.

Fluid intelligence refers to the ability to solve challenging novel problems when prior learning or accumulated experience are of limited use. ¹ Fluid intelligence ranks amongst the most important features of cognition, correlates with many cognitive abilities (e.g. memory), ² and predicts educational and professional success, ³ social mobility, ⁴ health ⁵ and longevity. ⁶ It is thought to be a key mental capacity involved in ‘active thinking’, ⁷ fluid intelligence declines dramatically in various types of dementia ⁸ and reflects the degree of executive impairment in older patients with frontal involvement. ⁹ Despite the importance of fluid intelligence in defining human behaviour, it remains contentious whether this is a single or a cluster of cognitive abilities and the nature of its relationship with the brain. ¹⁰

Fluid intelligence is traditionally measured with tests of novel problem-solving with non-verbal material that minimize dependence on prior knowledge. Such tests are known to have strong fluid intelligence correlations in large-scale factor analyses. ^{11, 12} Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices ¹³ (APM), a test widely adopted in clinical practice and research, ¹⁴ contains multiple choice visual analogy problems of increasing difficulty. Each problem presents an incomplete matrix of geometric figures with a multiple choice of options for the missing figure. Less commonly, verbal tests of fluid intelligence such as Part 1 of the Alice Heim 4 (AH4-1) ¹⁵ are adopted. The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) ¹⁶ has also been used to estimate fluid intelligence by averaging performance on a diverse range of subtests. However, several subtests (e.g. vocabulary) emphasize knowledge, disproportionately weighting measures of ‘crystallized’ intelligence, ^{17, 18} whilst others (e.g. picture completion) have rather low fluid intelligence correlations. ¹⁹ Hence, it has been argued that tests such as the APM are the most suitable for a theoretically-based investigation of changes in fluid intelligence after brain injury. ^{20, 21}

Proposals regarding the neural substrates of fluid intelligence have suggested close links with frontal and parietal functions. For example, Duncan and colleagues ²² have argued that a network of mainly frontal and parietal areas, termed the ‘multiple-demand network’ (MD), is ‘the seat’ of fluid intelligence. The highly influential parieto-frontal integration theory (P-FIT), based largely on neuroimaging studies of healthy subjects, posits that structural symbolism and abstraction emerge from sensory inputs to parietal cortex, with hypothesis generation and problem solving arising from interactions with frontal cortex. Once the best solution is identified, the anterior cingulate is engaged in response selection and inhibition of alternatives. ^{23, 24} Despite its name, P-FIT also posits occipital and temporal involvement, implying widely distributed substrates of fluid intelligence.