The future of mind-controlled machines might not be as far away as we think.
As director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, Dr Justin Sanchez is part of a team that is looking at how to decode brain signals and use them to control robotic prosthetics.
Continue reading “Direct Neural Interface & DARPA — Dr Justin Sanchez” »
Optimizing Human-System Performance — Dr. Greg Lieberman, Ph.D., Neuroscientist / Lead, U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Army Research Laboratory, U.S. Army Futures Command
Dr. Greg Lieberman, Ph.D. (https://www.arl.army.mil/arl25/meet-arl.php?gregory_lieberman) is a Neuroscientist, and Lead, Optimizing Human-System Performance, at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, Army Research Laboratory (DEVCOM ARL).
Many have argued that free will is in illusion, but science does not support that. We should be grateful that free will exists.
Circa 2007 face_with_colon_three
The World Wide Brain—a hybrid human–digital intelligent network, spanning the globe and carrying out information processing different in extent and nature from anything that has come before—is as yet little more than a dream and a little less than a reality. It is coming into being, bit by bit, each year. This process of emergence is, as all Net-aholics know, a wonder to behold, and growing more wondrous all the time. This is an exploration in which human psychology and sociology interact in a fascinating way, with the psychology of an emerging, nonhuman organism. It is an exploration in which mundane technical issues such as groupware and server–server communication software rub up against concepts from transpersonal psychology, such as the Collective Unconscious and the Hierarchy of Being. It is, therefore, an exploration that not only transcends disciplinary boundaries but pushes the boundaries of human thought itself. The increasing integration of human activity with World Wide Brain operations may ultimately occur via body-modifying or body-obsolescing technologies a la Moravec, or it may occur without them, through the advent of more sophisticated noninvasive interfaces. One way or another, it will fuse the global Web.
At first glance, the human body looks symmetrical: two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, even the nose and mouth appear to be mirrored on an imaginary axis dividing the faces of most people. And finally, the brain: it is divided into two halves that are roughly the same size, and the furrows and bulges also follow a similar pattern.
But the first impression is deceptive: the different brain regions have subtle yet functionally relevant differences between the left and right sides. The two hemispheres are specialized for different functions. Spatial attention, for example, is predominantly processed in the right hemisphere in most people, while language is largely processed in the left. This way, work can be distributed more effectively to both halves and thus the range of tasks is expanded overall.
But this so-called lateralization, the tendency for brain regions to process certain functions more in the left or right hemisphere, varies from person to person. And not only in the minority whose brains are specialized mirror-inverted compared to the majority. Even people with classically arranged brains differ in how pronounced their asymmetry is.
Daniel Dennett explores the first steps towards a unified theory of information, through common threads in the convergence of evolution, learning, and engineering.
Subscribe for regular science talks: http://bit.ly/RiSubscRibe.
Watch the Q&A now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beKC_7rlTuw.
Buy Daniel Dennett’s book “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” — https://geni.us/pAyVW
Continue reading “Information, Evolution, and intelligent Design — With Daniel Dennett” »
https://youtube.com/watch?v=DGbZ9J2nlNA
TWITTER
https://twitter.com/Transhumanian.
PATREON https://www.patreon.com/transhumania.
BITCOIN 14ZMLNppEdZCN4bu8FB1BwDaxbWteQKs8i.
BITCOIN CASH 1LhXJjN4FrfJh8LywR3dLG2uGXSaZjey9f.
ETHEREUM 0x1f89b261562C8D4C14aA01590EB42b2378572164
LITECOIN LdB94n8sTUXBto5ZKt82YhEsEmxomFGz3j.
CHAINLINK 0xDF560E12fF416eC2D4BAECC66E323C56af2f6666.
A team of scientists is using the tools offered by the HBP’s digital research infrastructure EBRAINS to address one of the oldest enigmas in neuroscience: the dichotomy of brain structure and function.
Every human brain is different. But even with structural differences, individual brains function in a similar way. In other words, there are functional brains based on completely different configurations. At the same time, a structural change may cause loss of function in one brain, but have no consequences in another individual. Or a drug cocktail may be efficient for one patient, and have no effects for another.
The study population comprised 6,245,282 older adults (age ≥65 years) who had medical encounters with healthcare organizations between 2/2/2020–5/30/2021 and had no prior diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. The population was divided into two cohorts: 1) COVID-19 cohort (n = 410,748)— contracted COVID-19 between 2/2/2020–5/30/2021; 2) non-COVID-19 cohort (n = 5,834,534)— had no documented COVID-19 but had medical encounters with healthcare organizations between 2/2/2020–5/30/2021. The status of Alzheimer’s disease and COVID-19 were based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) diagnosis codes and laboratory tests (details in the Supplementary Material).
We examined risks for new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease in COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cohorts in all older adults, three age groups (65–74, 75–84, ≥85), and three racial/ethnic groups (Black, White, and Hispanic). Cohorts were propensity-score matched (1:1 using a nearest neighbor greedy matching) for demographics, adverse socioeconomical determinants of health including problems with education, occupational exposure, physical, social and psychosocial environment, and known risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease [13] (details in the Supplementary Material). Kaplan-Meier analysis was used to estimate the probability of new diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease within 360 days after the COVID-19 diagnosis. Cox’s proportional hazards model was used to compare matched cohorts using hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals. All statistical tests were conducted within the TriNetX Advanced Analytics Platform at significance set at p < 0.05 (2-sided).
