Implanted brain electrodes send signals that bypass damaged spinal cord area, using man’s thoughts to stimulate leg movement.
Category: neuroscience – Page 404
Scientists have found a way to restore the brain and spinal cord interface, developing an implantable device that enables paralyzed patient to stand and walk again.
A spinal cord injury (SCI) can be debilitating for some people, making it difficult for them to walk normally again. Some individuals may take weeks to recover their ability to walk after an injury, while others may take months or even suffer from paralysis.
This is mainly due to the SCI hindering communication between the brain and the region of the spinal cord responsible for limb movement.
In short blood dilution is very, very good for you.
In this talk, Dr. Irina Conboy discusses the role of repair and regeneration in lifespan and healthspan, contending that these factors, rather than entropy and time progression, truly govern our aging process. She describes the research her team is pursuing, investigating whether improving the efficiency of bodily repair in older individuals could effectively make them younger. She suggests that biological age could potentially be reversed and discusses heterochronic parabiosis and plasma dilution as potential ways to accomplish that. Conboy highlights recent research suggesting that old blood has a greater impact on cellular health and function than young blood. She presents her team’s experimental research on the rejuvenation effects of plasma dilution, demonstrating its significant impact on reducing senescence, neuroinflammation, and promoting neurogenesis in the brains of old mice.
00:00:00 — Importance of repair and regeneration in aging.
00:04:45 — Young blood vs. old blood, heterochronic parabiosis.
00:10:17 — Plasma dilution is key.
00:15:49 — Kiana Aran’s blood heterochronicity on a chip.
00:17:56 — The role of senescence in parabiosis and blood exchange.
00:27:53 — Measurements of biological age.
00:36:57 — Systemic calibration is globally rejuvenative.
00:37:30 — Conclusions.
About the Speaker:
Irina Conboy is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Bioengineering. Her discovery of the rejuvenating effects of young blood through parabiosis in a seminal paper published in Nature in 2005 paved the way for a thriving field of rejuvenation biology. The Conboy lab currently focuses on broad rejuvenation of tissue maintenance and repair, stem cell niche engineering, elucidating the mechanisms underlying muscle stem cell aging, directed organogenesis, and making CRISPR a therapeutic reality.
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Whole Brain Emulation
Posted in existential risks, mapping, neuroscience, robotics/AI
I had an amazing experience at the Foresight Institute’s Whole-Brain Emulation (WBE) Workshop at a venue near Oxford! For more information and a list of participants, see: https://foresight.org/whole-brain-emulation-workshop-2023/ I had the opportunity to work within a group of some of the most brilliant, ambitious, and visionary people I’ve ever encountered on the quest for recreating the human brain in a computer. We also discussed in depth the existential risks of upcoming artificial superintelligence and how to mitigate these risks, perhaps with the aid of WBE.
My subgroup focused on exploring the challenge of human connectomics (mapping all of the neurons and synapses in the brain).
WBE is a potential technology to generate software intelligence that is human-aligned simply by being based directly on human brains. Generally past discussions have assumed a fairly long timeline to WBE, while past AGI timelines had broad uncertainty. There were also concerns that the neuroscience of WBE might boost AGI capability development without helping safety, although no consensus did develop. Recently many people have updated their AGI timelines towards earlier development, raising safety concerns. That has led some people to consider whether WBE development could be significantly speeded up, producing a differential technology development re-ordering of technology arrival that might lessen the risk of unaligned AGI by the presence of aligned software intelligence.
New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.”
Scientists stimulated the brains of macaque monkeys in an effort to determine which areas are responsible for driving consciousness.
A paralysed man has regained the ability to walk smoothly using only his thoughts for the first time, researchers said on Wednesday, thanks to two implants that restored communication between brain and spinal cord.
The patient Gert-Jan, who did not want to reveal his surname, said the breakthrough had given him “a freedom that I did not have” before.
The 40-year-old Dutchman has been paralysed in his legs for more than a decade after suffering a spinal cord injury during a bicycle accident.
From underground exploration to brain science and air-traffic control, the sensing potential of quantum devices is enormous. But they must first get out of the laboratory.
face_with_colon_three This new gold rush with AI will bring new jobs for even Psychiatry and Therapists which is already leading to new bots with human like therapists in texts. This could lead to even better mental health for the global population.
“Psychotherapy is very expensive and even in places like Canada, where I’m from, and other countries, it’s super expensive, the waiting lists are really long,” Ashley Andreou, a medical student focusing on psychiatry at Georgetown University, told Al Jazeera.
“People don’t have access to something that augments medication and is evidence-based treatment for mental health issues, and so I think that we need to increase access, and I do think that generative AI with a certified health professional will increase efficiency.”
The prospect of AI augmenting, or even leading, mental health treatment raises a myriad of ethical and practical concerns. These range from how to protect personal information and medical records, to questions about whether a computer programme will ever be truly capable of empathising with a patient or recognising warning signs such as the risk of self-harm.
Our guest is Nita Farahany, a Distinguished Professor at Duke University where she heads the Science, Law, and Policy Lab. The research she conducts in her lab specifically focuses on the implications of emerging neuroscience, genomics, and artificial intelligence; and, as a testament to her expertise, there is a long, long list of awards and influential positions she can lay claim to, including an appointment by Obama to the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues.
In this episode, we explore Nita’s recent publication, provocatively entitled, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology. This takes us on our tour of the current neurotechnology that exists, the upcoming ways in which this tech will be integrated into our daily products, how it will shape our decision making, the profound list of ethical considerations surrounding cognitive liberty, and much more.
See more about Nita at nitafarahany.com or follow her at twitter.com/NitaFarahany.
Learn more about Singularity: su.org
Host: Steven Parton — LinkedIn / Twitter
Music by: Amine el Filali.