Summary: Study reveals how the brain juggles morally conflicting outcomes while learning, finding people who opt to make decisions for personal gain at the expense of others can comprehend and empathize with potential negative outcomes, but still ultimately choose to pursue options that benefit them.
Source: KNAW
New research from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience sheds light on how the brain juggles morally conflicting outcomes during learning.
Biophysical Therapeutics, a drug discovery platform company that leverages computational biology, has emerged from stealth. The primary targets of the Delaware-based company are cancer, the diseases of aging (including Alzheimer’s disease) and – excitingly – aging itself.
Founded by Dr Michael Forrest, a Cambridge University biochemistry graduate with a PhD in computer science, Biophysical Therapeutics boasts renowned biotech entrepreneur Professor George Church (of Harvard Medical School) as an advisor to the company. Professor Bruno Conti of the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California is also an advisor.
Longevity. Technology: Back in 2006, Conti and his team reported an exciting result in the prestigious journal Science. They showed (in female mice) that slightly reducing the metabolic rate by slightly reducing metabolic heat generation (decreasing body temperature by 0.34°C) increased lifespan by 20%.
Summary: Researchers investigate brain region synchronization in order to assist control of brain-machine interfaces.
Source: UPF Barcelona.
Just a few decades ago, the possibility of connecting the brain with a computer to convert neural signals into concrete actions would have seemed like something from science fiction.
How long is the present? The answer, Cornell researchers suggest in a new study, depends on your heart.
They found that our momentary perception of time is not continuous but may stretch or shrink with each heartbeat.
The research builds evidence that the heart is one of the brain’s important timekeepers and plays a fundamental role in our sense of time passing—an idea contemplated since ancient times, said Adam K. Anderson, professor in the Department of Psychology and in the College of Human Ecology (CHE).
There’s an excessive amount of innovation embedded in right now’s cutting-edge pc chips, however not a lot of it’s as out-of-the-box because the considering that’s driving Australian startup Cortical Labs. The corporate, like so many startups with synthetic intelligence in thoughts, is constructing pc chips that borrow their neural community inspiration from the organic mind. The distinction? Cortical is utilizing precise organic neurons, taken from mice and people, to make their chips.
“We’re constructing the primary hybrid pc chip which entails implanting organic neurons on silicon chips,” Hon Weng Chong, CEO and co-founder of Cortical Labs, informed Digital Tendencies.
That is completed by first extracting neurons in two other ways, both from a mouse embryo or by remodeling human pores and skin cells again into stem cells and inducing these to develop into human neurons.
Dr Jordan B Peterson and Dr. Del Paulhus delve deep into the Dark Tetrad: Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy, and the newly added Sadism. From these four traits, researchers can quantify much of the darkness of humanity, and begin to study it in a way that yields numerical results, and the potential to make substantial predictions.
Dr. Delroy Paulhus is a personality researcher whose work in dark personality traits, via a variety of psychometric methods, has yielded measures of the Dark Tetrad. His work has also validated measures of socially desirable responding, perceived control, free will and determinism, and over-claiming. His work has been published in over 150 articles and books, and his current citation count exceeds 43,000.
One of the most concerning outcomes following surgery and anesthesia among older adults is a condition known as postoperative cognitive dysfunction (POCD). Often, patients and their family members report feeling very fearful that the patient will suffer permanent cognitive deficits after anesthesia. Unfortunately, this pre-emptive fear may contribute to the complex array of symptoms associated with POCD and further complicate the ability to fully understand the subjective experience of this postoperative complication.
About the study
The current study published in the British Journal of Anesthesia involved the collection of data from the comments section of the published article titled ‘The hidden long-term risks of surgery.’ The comments were given an alphanumeric code to maintain chronological order and structure, while the username, submission date, and time were kept anonymous.
To ensure your survival, your brain evolved to avoid one thing: uncertainty. As neuroscientist Beau Lotto points out, if your ancestors wondered for too long whether that noise was a predator or not, you wouldn’t be here right now. Our brains are geared to make fast assumptions, and questioning them in many cases quite literally equates to death. No wonder we’re so hardwired for confirmation bias. No wonder we’d rather stick to the status quo than risk the uncertainty of a better political model, a fairer financial system, or a healthier relationship pattern. But here’s the catch: as our brains evolved toward certainty, we simultaneously evolved away from creativity—that’s no coincidence; creativity starts with a question, with uncertainty, not with a cut and dried answer. To be creative, we have to unlearn millions of years of evolution. Creativity asks us to do that which is hardest: to question our assumptions, to doubt what we believe to be true. That is the only way to see differently. And if you think creativity is a chaotic and wild force, think again, says Beau Lotto. It just looks that way from the outside. The brain cannot make great leaps, it can only move linearly through mental possibilities. When a creative person forges a connection between two things that are, to your mind, so far apart, that’s a case of high-level logic. They have moved through steps that are invisible to you, perhaps because they are more open-minded and well-practiced in questioning their assumptions. Creativity, it seems, is another (highly sophisticated) form of logic. Beau Lotto is the author of Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently.