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Category: neuroscience – Page 415

Nondestructive Mind Uploading and the Stream of Consciousness

I’ve released my latest paper. Enjoy:

Abstract.

A common interpretation of wakeful, nondestructive mind uploading is that the person with the postoperative original body exclusively persists the preoperative identity and that the person with the upload’s body is some sort of identity copy. A frequent argument supporting this claim is that the preoperative person’s stream of consciousness attaches exclusively to the postoperative person with the original body. By implication, the person with the upload’s body spawns a new stream of consciousness, implying copy identity status. I argue that this is not the best metaphysical model of what happens in nondestructive uploading in the context of a stream of consciousness interpretation, and defend an alternative model which has generally received little attention in the existing literature: the branching identity model.

Could marine plasmalogens be the secret weapon to fight Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s?

The research paper reviews the potential benefits of marine plasmalogens, a type of glycerophospholipid, in combating age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. These compounds, abundant in marine resources, could improve lipid metabolism and reduce oxidative stress, offering a new avenue for improving the quality of life in aging populations.

Decoding Decision-Making: Insect Brains Are More Complex Than We Thought

Summary: The mushroom body—a key area in the brains of arthropods like insects—plays a crucial role in abstract behavioral decision-making.

Contrary to the long-standing belief that insects react purely on stimulus-response, the study shows they can actually make nuanced decisions based on experiences. The researchers recorded feeding behavior alongside neural signals.

This has implications for understanding not just insect behavior but also basic neurobiological principles that are similar in humans.

Scientists discover new microglial population important for memory and learning

Following more than seven years of research, researchers at the University of Seville-IBiS (Institute of Biomedicine of Seville) have identified a new key cell type with a critical role in the developmental processes of memory and learning. This breakthrough has been published in the prestigious journal Nature Neuroscience.

The research, led jointly by the University of Seville-IBiS and Karolinska Institutet, helps to understand how neural systems with decisive functions for human behavior mature. The in-depth study highlights the role of microglia, a group of cells that has been the subject of substantial information in recent years due to its involvement in various brain pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Zap Your Brain, Boost Your Math Skills

Summary: Researchers discovered that electrical noise stimulation to the frontal part of the brain can improve mathematical learning.

The study focused on those who initially showed low levels of brain excitation towards math. Unlike in placebo groups, unlike in placebo groups, a significant improvement in math skills was observed after the application of neurostimulation. This novel approach could revolutionize personalized learning.

The Bottom-Up Processing View of Perception

Bottom-up processing is an explanation for perceptions that start with an incoming stimulus and work upward until a representation of the object is formed in our minds. This process suggests that our perceptual experience is based entirely on the sensory stimuli that we piece together using only data that is available from our senses.

In order to make sense of the world, we must take in energy from the environment and convert it to neural signals, a process known as sensation. It is in the next step of the process, known as perception, that our brains interpret these sensory signals.

How exactly do people process perceptual information from the world around them? There are two basic approaches to understanding how this sensation and perception take place. One of these is known as bottom-up processing and the other is known as top-down processing.

Woman’s mystery illness turns out to be 3-inch snake parasite in her brain

A neurosurgeon in Australia pulled a wriggling 3-inch roundworm from the brain of a 64-year-old woman last year—which was quite the surprise to the woman’s team of doctors and infectious disease experts, who had spent over a year trying to identify the cause of her recurring and varied symptoms.

A close study of the extracted worm made clear why the diagnosis was so hard to pin down: the roundworm was one known to infect snakes—specifically carpet pythons endemic to the area where the woman lived—as well as the pythons’ mammalian prey. The woman is thought to be the first reported human to ever have an infection with this snake-adapted worm, and it is the first time the worm has been found burrowing through a mammalian brain.

When the woman’s illness began, “trying to identify the microscopic larvae, which had never previously been identified as causing human infection, was a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” Karina Kennedy, a professor at the Australian National University (ANU) Medical School and Director of Clinical Microbiology at Canberra Hospital, said in a press release.

The functional connectome across temporal scales

Sepideh Sadaghiani, Associate Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, & Bioengineering at Illinois, lectured on “The functional connectome across temporal scales” at 4:00 pm in 2,269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom. Introduction by Ryan Miller, MBM trainee and PhD candidate in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering.

For more information on the lecture and Dr. Sadaghiani: https://publish.illinois.edu/minibrain/2022/07/26/sepideh-sa…s-lecture/

For a list of our upcoming events: https://minibrain.beckman.illinois.edu/events/

This video was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant 1735252. https://minibrain.beckman.illinois.edu/