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Category: neuroscience – Page 482

According to the theory, all that’s needed to solve the hard problem of consciousness is to change our assumptions about it. When we realize that consciousness is a physical, relativistic phenomenon, the mystery of consciousness naturally dissolves.

How do 3 pounds of brain tissue create thoughts, feelings, mental images, and a detailed inner world?

The ability of the brain to create consciousness has baffled people for millennia. The mystery of consciousness lies in the fact that each of us has subjectivity, with the ability to sense, feel, and think. In contrast to being under anesthesia or in a dreamless deep sleep, while we’re awake we don’t “live in the dark” — we experience the world and ourselves. However, it remains a mystery how the brain creates the conscious experience and what area of the brain is responsible.

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“We are aiming to provide capabilities in the tens to hundreds of milliwatts range, depending on the use case,” Makhijani said.

Compared to the first–gen chip GrAI One, the third–gen GrAI VIP is slightly physically smaller at 7.6 × 7.6 mm, but the company has skipped a process node and migrated to TSMC 12 nm. The chip has slightly fewer neuron cores, 144 compared to 196, but each core is bigger. The result is a jump from 200,000 neuron cores (250,000 parameters) to around 18 million neurons for a total of 48 million parameters. On–chip memory has jumped from 4 MB to 36 MB.

An M.2 hardware development kit featuring GrAI VIP is available now, shipping with GrAI Matter’s GrAI Flow software stack and model zoo for image classification, object detection, and image segmentation.

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Comotion_design/iStock.

The U.S. Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is a collaboration among the National Institutes of Health, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, National Science Foundation, Food and Drug Administration, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, and others. Since its inception in 2013, its goal has been to develop and use new technologies to examine how each neuron and neural circuit come together to “record, process, utilize, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information, all at the speed of thought.”

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Human Augmentation Examples. What are examples of augmentations to the human body? Should we allow such augmentation methods and technologies? What are dangers, and risks involved? How can society benefit from these developments?

On Brave New World conference 2020 I gave this webinar with the title: ‘The Human Body. The Next Frontier’.

Please leave a comment if you like the video or when you have a question!

Content:

Continue reading “HUMAN AUGMENTATION EXAMPLES — Webinar at Brave New World | Peter Joosten MSc” | >

This article tells of possible way to increase brain intelligence through a certain mutation which in theory could be altered for biological singularity like effects in the future.

Humans carrying the CORD7 (cone-rod dystrophy 7) mutation possess increased verbal IQ and working memory. This autosomal dominant syndrome is caused by the single-amino acid R844H exchange (human numbering) located in the 310 helix of the C2A domain of RIMS1/RIM1 (Rab3-interacting molecule 1). RIM is an evolutionarily conserved multi-domain protein and essential component of presynaptic active zones, which is centrally involved in fast, Ca2+-triggered neurotransmitter release. How the CORD7 mutation affects synaptic function has remained unclear thus far. Here, we established Drosophila melanogaster as a disease model for clarifying the effects of the CORD7 mutation on RIM function and synaptic vesicle release.

To this end, using protein expression and X-ray crystallography, we solved the molecular structure of the Drosophila C2A domain at 1.92 Å resolution and by comparison to its mammalian homolog ascertained that the location of the CORD7 mutation is structurally conserved in fly RIM. Further, CRISPR/Cas9-assisted genomic engineering was employed for the generation of rim alleles encoding the R915H CORD7 exchange or R915E, R916E substitutions (fly numbering) to effect local charge reversal at the 310 helix. Through electrophysiological characterization by two-electrode voltage clamp and focal recordings we determined that the CORD7 mutation exerts a semi-dominant rather than a dominant effect on synaptic transmission resulting in faster, more efficient synaptic release and increased size of the readily releasable pool but decreased sensitivity for the fast calcium chelator BAPTA.

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Realistic and complex models of brain cells, developed at Cedars-Sinai with support from our scientists and our #openscience data, could help answer questions a… See more.

Cedars-Sinai investigators have created bio-realistic and complex computer models of individual brain cells—in unparalleled quantity.

Their research, published today in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports, details how these models could one day answer questions about neurological disorders—and even human intellect—that aren’t possible to explore through biological experiments.

“These models capture the shape, timing and speed of the electrical signals that neurons fire in order to communicate with each other, which is considered the basis of brain function,” said Costas Anastassiou, PhD, a research scientist in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai, and senior author of the study. “This lets us replicate brain activity at the single-cell level.”

Continue reading “Cedars-Sinai Creates Computer Models of Brain Cells” | >

You might identify with the Mind After Midnight hypothesis if you’ve ever stayed up late angrily commenting on Twitter posts, finishing another bottle of wine, eating a whole pint of ice cream out of the container, or just feeling miserable.

The hypothesis suggests that when humans are awake during the biological circadian night—after midnight for most people—there are neurophysiological changes in the brain that alter the way we interact with the world, especially actions related to impulse control, reward processing, and information processing. The hypothesis was detailed in a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Network Psychology.

“There are millions of people who are awake in the middle of the night, and there’s fairly good evidence that their brain is not functioning as well as it does during the day.” —

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Skyrmions are ultra-stable atomic objects first discovered in real materials in 2009, which have more recently also been found also to exist at room temperatures. These unique objects have a number of desirable properties, including a substantially small threshold voltage, nanoscale sizes and easy electrical manipulation.

While these properties could be advantageous for the creation of a wide range of electronics, developing functional all– using skyrmions has so far proved to be very challenging. One possible application for skyrmions is in neuromorphic computing, which entails the creation of artificial structures that resemble those observed in the human brain.

With this in mind, researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have recently investigated the possibility of using skyrmions to replicate mechanisms observed in the human brain. Their paper, published in Nature Electronics, shows that these ultra-stable atomic structures can be used to mimic some behaviors of biological synapses, which are junctions between neurons through which nerve impulses are passed on to different parts of the human brain.

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