Lifeboat Foundation

Summary: An overgrowth in the gastrointestinal tract of the bacteria Klebsiella in preterm babies was associated with an increased presence of certain immune cells and the development of neurological damage. The findings suggest a link between microbiota and brain development.

Source: University of Vienna.

Extremely premature infants are at high risk for brain damage. Researchers at the University of Vienna and the Medical University of Vienna have now found possible targets for the early treatment of such damage outside the brain: Bacteria in the gut of premature infants may play a key role.

The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to learn how the human brain gives rise to human intelligence and what it means to be intelligent. Understanding how the brain works is considered one of humanity’s greatest challenges.

Jeff Hawkins thinks that the reality we perceive is a kind of simulation, a hallucination, a confabulation. He thinks that our brains are a model reality based on thousands of information streams originating from the sensors in our body. Critically — Hawkins doesn’t think there is just one model but rather; thousands.

Continue reading “Jeff Hawkins (Thousand Brains Theory)” »

And, we have Quantum Computers of course, and they’ll be radically more advanced by 2025.

Why quantum computers, if successfully built, might be what neuroscientists need to carry out large multi-scale simulations of the brain. In fact, it will likely be impossible to do so without them, or some computationally equivalent technology.

Science can solve the great mystery of consciousness – how physical matter gives rise to conscious experience – we just have to use the right approach, says neuroscientist Anil Seth.

Circa 2019

STRANGER Things has attracted a global audience of over 20million viewers who love the show for its eerie plot lines involving secret government experiments and monsters from other dimensions.

But the alleged real-life stories that inspired the Netflix show — which was confirmed for a forth series on Monday - are more terrifying than anything in the fictional town of Hawkins, where the series is set.

Continue reading “The real Stranger Things secret government projects — including LSD mind control experiments and claims of child kidnappings” »

“It’s really important that we don’t think of structures in the brain as monolithic,” said Gowrishankar. “There’s lots of little nuance in brain. How plastic it is. How it’s wired. This finding is showing one way how differences can play out.”

Researchers alter two of five genes responsible for vision in Aedes aegypti to make human targets less visible to these flying insects.

The authors add that the research informs fundamental scientific understanding of how face recognition works in the brain, suggesting that not only a face’s visual cues but also prior social knowledge plays an active role in perceiving faces.

Summary: Knowledge of an individual’s personality can influence the perception of a face’s identity and bias it toward unrelated people or identities, researchers report.

Source: NYU

Continue reading “People Look Alike if We Think They Have Similar Personalities” »

In a discovery published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers has described a novel molecular device with exceptional computing prowess.

Reminiscent of the plasticity of connections in the human brain, the device can be reconfigured on the fly for different computational tasks by simply changing applied voltages. Furthermore, like nerve cells can store memories, the same device can also retain information for future retrieval and processing.

“The brain has the remarkable ability to change its wiring around by making and breaking connections between nerve cells. Achieving something comparable in a physical system has been extremely challenging,” said Dr. R. Stanley Williams, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. “We have now created a molecular device with dramatic reconfigurability, which is achieved not by changing physical connections like in the brain, but by reprogramming its logic.”