Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: neuroscience – Page 409

I gotta admit although effective and innovative, it’s also kinda creepy.

Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.

The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.

Then they set up a very basic-reward system, using the fact that small clusters of brain cells tend to try to minimize unpredictability in their environment. So if the paddle hit the ball, the cells would receive a nice, predictable stimulus. But if it missed, the cells would get four seconds of totally unpredictable stimulation.

Read more | >

During routine navigation in daily life, our brains use spatial mapping and memory to guide us from point A to point B. Just as routine: making a mistake in navigation that requires a course correction.

Now, researchers at Harvard Medical School have identified a specific group of neurons in a brain region involved in navigation that undergo bursts of activity when mice running a maze veer off course and correct their error.

The findings, published July 19 in Nature, bring scientists a step closer to understanding how navigation works, while raising new questions. These questions include the specific role these neurons play during navigation, and what they are doing in other brain regions where they are found.

Read more | >

During routine navigation in daily life, our brains use spatial mapping and memory to guide us from point A to point B. Just as routine is making a mistake in navigation that requires a course correction.

Now, researchers at Harvard Medical School have identified a specific group of neurons in a region involved in that undergo bursts of activity when running a maze veer off course and correct their error.

The findings, published July 19 in Nature, bring scientists a step closer to understanding how navigation works, while raising new questions. These questions include the specific role these neurons play during navigation, and what they are doing in other brain regions where they are found.

Read more | >

And the right to freedom of thought enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is similarly open to interpretation. It was historically put in place to protect freedoms surrounding beliefs, religion, and speech. But that could change, says Ienca. “Rights are not static entities,” he says.

He is among the ethicists and legal scholars investigating the importance of “neuro rights”—the subset of human rights concerned with the protection of the human brain and mind. Some are currently exploring whether neuro rights could be recognized within established human rights, or whether we need new laws.

Her case highlights why we need to enshrine neuro rights in law.

Read more | >

In recent years, we’ve seen neurotechnologies move from research labs to real-world use. Schools have used some devices to monitor the brain activity of children to tell when they are paying attention. Police forces are using others to work out whether someone is guilty of a crime. And employers use them to keep workers awake and productive.

These technologies hold the remarkable promise of giving us all-new insight into our own minds. But our brain data is precious, and letting it fall into the wrong hands could be dangerous, Farahany argues in her new book, The Battle for Your Brain. I chatted with her about some of her concerns.

We need new rules to protect our cognitive liberty, says futurist and legal ethicist Nita Farahany.

Read more | >

More than a quarter of all stroke victims develop a bizarre disorder—they lose conscious awareness of half of all that their eyes perceive.

After a stroke in the brain’s right half, for example, a person might eat only what’s on the right side of the plate because they’re unaware of the other half. The person may see only the right half of a photo and ignore a person on their left side.

Surprisingly, though, such stroke victims can emotionally react to the entire photo or scene. Their brains seem to be taking it all in, but these people are consciously aware of only half the world.

Read more | >

Abstract: A scientific theory of consciousness could be merely descriptive, nothing more than a kind of empirical, statistical phenomenology. We already have a lot of data which fit into this kind of modest theorizing. Better would be a theory which reveals the nature of consciousness. Here a famous gap looms between any such theory of consciousness and a theory of the conscious brain, neither of which are actually in our possession. The gap is so serious and so immense that it has led to remarkable responses, such as the illusionist view that consciousness does not exist. I think the gap suggests there are lurking assumptions about the nature of both consciousness and matter which are fundamentally at odds with one another. A ‘neutral monist’ view may be able to avoid these assumptions to find a place in nature for consciousness and scientific theorizing about it.

Read more | >