Lifeboat Foundation

Newswise — Most of modern medicine has physical tests or objective techniques to define much of what ails us. Yet, there is currently no blood or genetic test, or impartial procedure that can definitively diagnose a mental illness, and certainly none to distinguish between different psychiatric disorders with similar symptoms. Experts at the University of Tokyo are combining machine learning with brain imaging tools to redefine the standard for diagnosing mental illnesses.

“Psychiatrists, including me, often talk about symptoms and behaviors with patients and their teachers, friends and parents. We only meet patients in the hospital or clinic, not out in their daily lives. We have to make medical conclusions using subjective, secondhand information,” explained Dr. Shinsuke Koike, M.D., Ph.D., an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and a senior author of the study recently published in Translational Psychiatry.

“Frankly, we need objective measures,” said Koike.

“How would you like to be known as the neurosurgeon who cured Parkinson’s disease?”

A month before the scheduled surgery, the four researchers were ready to chaperone the brain cells on their 190-mile journey. They never anticipated they were in for “The Amazing Race”-meets-“ER.”

It was after midnight on a late summer night in 2017, and they had less than eight hours to get the cells by ambulance, private plane, and another ambulance from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston to Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. If it took longer, the cells would almost certainly be DOA, and so might the researchers’ plan to carry out an experimental transplant surgery unprecedented in the annals of medicine: replacing the dysfunctional brain cells of a Parkinson’s disease patient with the progeny of an extraordinary type of stem cell. Created in the lab from a patch of the patient’s own skin, these cells, it was hoped, would settle into the brain like they belonged there and permanently restore the patient’s ability to walk and move normally.

Continue reading “Doctors treat Parkinson’s with a novel brain cell transplant” »

Network neuroscience could revolutionize how we understand the brain—and change our approach to neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Individual frequency can be used to specifically influence certain areas of the brain and thus the abilities processed in them — solely by electrical stimulation on the scalp, without any surgical intervention. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have now demonstrated this for the first time.

Stroke, Parkinson’s disease and depression — these medical illnesses have one thing in common: they are caused by changes in brain functions. For a long time, research has therefore been conducted into ways of influencing individual brain functions without surgery in order to compensate for these conditions.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig have taken a decisive step. They have succeeded in precisely influencing the functioning of a single area of the brain. For a few minutes, they inhibited exactly the area that processes the sense of touch by specifically intervening in its rhythm. As a result, the area that was less networked with other brain regions, its so-called functional connectivity, decreased, and thus also the exchange of information with other brain networks.

A Sound Treatment

Ultrasound is an oddball in the neuromodulation world. Similar to its better-known siblings, such as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDSC) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), ultrasound changes how neurons fire, which in turn changes their computational output—what we observe as learning, memory, and other behaviors. This idea, dubbed neuromodulation, has taken the neurological world by storm for its near “magical” efficacy for treating people with depression who don’t respond to antidepressants, or people with Parkinson’s disease whose movement patterns are severely disrupted.

Compared to first-generation neuromodulation, where the brain-tweaking gadget is surgically implanted into the brain, ultrasound offers a way to “hack” neural firings from the outside. In a way, the technology uses sound waves to mechanically “shake” the neurons in a circuit back into sequence, so they function in sync as needed and control subsequent outputs like learning, thinking, memory, and decision-making.

Dopamine, dopamine, wherefore art thou my dopamine?

Oh wait, I just need to press a button on my computer for that!

The American Chemical Society (ACS) are closer to using electronics in the body, to diagnose tumours and track illnesses: Read about it on OAG.

#CyberneticSingularity

About 542 million years ago, something weird and profoundly remarkable happened on Earth. Quite suddenly, life went insanely inventive, proliferating from simple, rudimentary single-celled organisms into myriad multi-cellular forms. Evolution discovered the idea of more sophisticated and specialized cells, and most of the basic body plans we know today. Biologists call it the Cambrian explosion.

Continue reading “Nearing the Cybernetic Singularity: What is the Syntellect Emergence?” »

Objective reality is merely a pattern that a mind constructs because it provides a useful simplified explanatory scaffolding of the long series of subjectively perceived moments stored in its memory. Needless to say that the Vigner’s Friend experiment mentioned in the article is not the only experimental evidence for the objectivity myth. Think about it when the next time you come across these overloaded terms ‘objective reality’ and ‘objectivity’ — to be precise, they mean ‘intersubjectivity’ instead: Termites would never comprehend chess, for example, this human abstraction lies beyond their species-specific intersubjective mind-network. Apart from inter-species levels of abstractions we should consider psychological, cultural and linguistic differences between individuals of the same species that makes objectivity simply non-existent. Conclusion: we can still use ‘objective reality’, ‘objectivity’ or ‘objectively’ colloquially but we should bear in mind that in a deeper sense these terms are no more than colorful misnomers. https://medium.com/@alexvikoulov/the-objectivity-myth-what-w…b697a5179d

#ObjectivityMyth #ObjectiveReality #ConsensusReality #intersubjectivity #UniversalMind #UniversalConsciousness

“It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of consciousness is the ultimate reality.” –Eugene Wigner

Continue reading “The Objectivity Myth: What we call ‘Objective Reality’ is just a colorful misnomer” »

“A neuron in the human brain can never equate the human mind, but this analogy doesn’t hold true for a digital mind, by virtue of its mathematical structure, it may – through evolutionary progression and provided there are no insurmountable evolvability constraints – transcend to the higher-order Syntellect. A mind is a web of patterns fully integrated as a coherent intelligent system; it is a self-generating, self-reflective, self-governing network of sentient components… that evolves, as a rule, by propagating through dimensionality and ascension to ever-higher hierarchical levels of emergent complexity. In this book, the Syntellect emergence is hypothesized to be the next meta-system transition, developmental stage for the human mind – becoming one global mind – that would constitute the quintessence of the looming Cybernetic Singularity.” –Alex M. Vikoulov, The Syntellect Hypothesis https://www.ecstadelic.net/e_news/gearing-for-the-2020-visio…ss-release

#SyntellectHypothesis

Continue reading “Gearing for the 20/20 Vision of Our Cybernetic Future — The Syntellect Hypothesis, Expanded Edition | Press Release” »