Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands and the Veterans Administration in the U.S. has conducted a genome-wide association study looking into genetic overlap between 12 common psychiatric disorders. The group describes profiling pleiotropic genetic incidences to 12 common psychiatric disorders in their paper published in the journal Nature Genetics.

Many years ago, psychiatrists and other medical professionals preferred to think of psychiatric conditions as separate diseases, unrelated to one another. More recently, genetics findings involved in psychiatric disorders have suggested that not only are some of them related, but some have overlap, which suggests that illnesses such as autism might have multiple forms, giving rise to a spectrum of diseases.

In this new effort, the research team conducted a cross-examination of 12 psychiatric disorders, looking specifically for genetic overlap. Their work involved conducting a cross-trait meta-analysis to study the impact of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), genes in general, cells, pathways and tissue types that might be shared by the 12 disorders ADHD, alcoholism, anorexia, anxiety disorder, autism, bipolarism, depression, OCD, PTSD, schizophrenia and Tourette syndrome.

Bernardo Kastrup, Carlo Rovelli and Patricia Churchland lock horns over the New Science of Consciousness.

00:00 Intro.
01:20 Patricia Churchland | On scientific evidence.
02:50 Bernardo Kastrup | On material idealism.
04:47 Carlo Rovelli | There is no hard problem of consciousness.
07:00 Robert Lawrence Kuhn | Will we ever be able to provide data explaining consciousness?

Continue reading “Can science crack the mystery of consciousness? | Bernardo Kastrup, Carlo Rovelli, and more” »

According to an exclusive report by Reuters, Elon Musk’s Neuralink is facing a federal probe to investigate claims of unnecessary animal welfare violations.

According to an exclusive report by Reuters, the medical device company Neuralink, owned by Elon Musk, is reportedly under federal investigation for possible animal welfare violations. The investigation comes from internal staff complaints that its animal testing is being rushed, resulting in needless suffering and deaths.

Continue reading “Neuralink allegedly rushes research, killing thousands of animals unnecessarily” »

Alzheimer’s disease is a disease that attacks the brain, causing a decline in mental ability that worsens over time. It is the most common form of dementia and accounts for 60 to 80 percent of dementia cases. There is no current cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but there are medications that can help ease the symptoms.

According to a meta-analysis recently published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, higher exposure to a certain type of traffic-related air pollution known as particulate matter may be connected to an increased risk of dementia. Researchers focused on fine particulate matter, or PM_2.5, which is made up of airborne pollutants with a diameter of fewer than 2.5 microns. The meta-analysis examined all available studies on the relationship between air pollution and dementia risk.

“As people continue to live longer, conditions like dementia are becoming more common, so detecting and understanding preventable risk factors is key to reducing the increase of this disease,” said study author Ehsan Abolhasani, MD, MSc, of Western University in London, Canada. “Since a report by the World Health Organization showed that more than 90% of the world population is living in areas with higher than recommended levels of air pollution, our results provide more evidence for enforcing regulations for air quality and accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable energies.”

17 studies were analyzed by the researchers for the meta-analysis. Participants had a minimum age of 40. More than 91 million individuals took part in all the studies. 5.5 million of them, or 6%, developed dementia.

Summary: The development of a child’s general and grammatical linguistic abilities between the ages of 3 to 4 is accompanied by the maturation of brain structures within the “language network”.

Source: RUB

Anyone who has ever learned a foreign language knows how laborious it is to acquire vocabulary and grammar. In contrast, children acquire their first language seemingly effortlessly. By the age of four, many children are already speaking without errors and can draw on a large vocabulary.

Our Wolfram Physics Project has provided a surprisingly successful picture of the underlying (deeply computational) structure of our physical universe. I’ll talk here about how our perception of that underlying structure is determined by what seem to be key features of our consciousness—and how this leads to detailed laws of physics as we experience them. Our Physics Project has led to the concept of the ruliad—the entangled limit of all possible computations—which seems to represent a common underlying structure from which both physics and mathematics emerge. I’ll talk about the comparison between physical and mathematical observers, and how their common features in consciousness lead to implications for general laws of “bulk mathematics”.

The use of smartphones has become an increasingly popular behaviour in people’s lives. However, an increased number of people find it difficult to minimise the use of smartphones, leading to the emergence of smartphone-addictive behaviours (Panova and Carbonell, 2018; Busch and McCarthy, 2021). In particular, the rapid spread of coronavirus disease 2019 around the world has led to a dramatic increase in the number of smartphone addicts due to home isolation (Caponnetto et al., 2021). Smartphone addiction is an emerging behavioural addiction, which refers to excessive dependence on and abuse of smartphones by individuals (Kwon et al., 2013; Billieux et al., 2015). Notably, smartphone addiction has been reported to have negative impacts on individuals’ cognitive functions, such as attention (Choi et al., 2021; Lee et al., 2021), perception (Dong et al., 2014) and memory (Hartanto and Yang, 2016; Tanil et al., 2020). Nevertheless, the influence of smartphone addiction on individuals’ advanced cognition is still unclear. Smartphone addiction may impair flexible cognitive processes (Dong et al., 2014), such as those that contribute to creative cognition. However, to our knowledge, the influence of smartphone addiction on creative cognition has not been explored.

Given the negative effects and high incidence of smartphone addiction (Zou et al., 2021), it is essential to uncover the underlying mechanisms, especially the neural mechanisms, by which smartphone addiction affects creative cognition. Creative cognition is defined as the ability to generate original and useful products (Sternberg and Lubart, 1999). It is a core cognitive element that allows for daily flexible problem solving and the generation of new ideas. The main components of creative cognition are (i) overcoming the semantic constraints of existing knowledge, which involves goal-directed behaviour through cognitive control, and (ii) building unusual associations to expand the existing structure of knowledge, which involves the spontaneous and unconstrained generation of novel associations (Ward et al., 1997; Abraham, 2014; Marron and Faust, 2019).

According to the problematic mobile phone use model (Billieux et al., 2015), the lack of planning or reduced cognitive control is a crucial contributor to smartphone addiction behaviour. Previous studies have also indicated that impaired cognitive control is a prominent feature of smartphone addicts, characterised by an inability to focus on task-related information and an inability to suppress dominant, automatic responses (Van Deursen et al., 2015; Li et al., 2021). In fact, previous studies have emphasised the contribution of cognitive control to the generation of creative ideas (Beaty et al., 2016; Benedek and Fink, 2019). During creative idea generation, known ideas are often initially retrieved, which acts as a source of interference allowing the retrieval process to focus on familiar and dominant ideas (Abraham, 2014). In this context, cognitive control is needed to drive the retrieval process of novel and remote information.

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – At a conference Wednesday afternoon, a UCSF researcher presented the results of a two-year study that found strong evidence that the risk factors for dementia can be reduced up to 30% with a modified lifestyle.

Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of Psychiatry, Neurology, and Epidemiology, presented her findings from a two-year randomized pilot study of nearly 200 older adults at the annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference in San Francisco.

She told KPIX 5 that it’s still a complex puzzle as to why some people get Alzheimer’s Disease and others don’t. That’s why her team of researchers joined forces with some colleagues at Kaiser Washington in Seattle and proceeded with the two-year study.