Lifeboat Foundation

One of the reasons branching identity is being accepted more seriously these days.

Beginning in the 1950s, experiments with split-brain patients revealed that consciousness could be divided between the two hemispheres of the brain. A surprising implication was that if consciousness could be divided, then it could also be combined. Evidence of this came in 2006, when conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan were born. The Hogan sisters were born with their brains connected by a thalamic bridge, which allowed a unique mental connection between them. We explore this surprising mental connection, and the possibility that we may one day connect our own minds with other conscious beings, together with what this might mean for our concept of self, identity, and the future of mind.

Continue reading “Split-Brains, Consciousness and Combining Minds | Waking Cosmos Documentary” »

Roche and its Genentech subsidiary have committed up to $12 billion to Recursion in return for using its Recursion Operating System (OS) to advance therapies in 40 programs that include “key areas” of neuroscience and an undisclosed oncology indication.

Recursion OS applies machine learning and high-content screening methods in what the companies said would be a “transformational” model for tech-enabled target and drug discovery.

The integrated, multi-faceted OS is designed to generate, analyze and glean insights from large-scale proprietary biological and chemical datasets—in this case, extensive single-cell perturbation screening data from Roche and Genentech—by integrating wet-lab and dry-lab biology at scale to phenomically capture chemical and genetic alterations in neuroscience-related cell types and select cancer cell lines.

Blocking matrix metalloproteinases MMP2 and MMP9 can have the opposite effect on neuroplasticity depending on whether the brain is healthy or injured.

Summary: Blocking the matrix metalloproteinases MMP2 and MMP9 can have the opposite effect on neuroplasticity depending on whether the brain is healthy or injured.

Source: University of Gottingen

Continue reading “Learning and Protecting Itself: How the Brain Adapts” »

What if your brain at 77 were as plastic as it was at 7? What if you could learn Mandarin with the ease of a toddler or play Rachmaninoff without breaking a sweat? A growing understanding of neuroplasticity suggests these fantasies could one day become reality. Neuroplasticity may also be the key to solving diseases like Alzheimer’s, depression, and autism. In this program, leading neuroscientists discuss their most recent findings and both the tantalizing possibilities and pitfalls for our future cognitive selves.

PARTICIPANTS: alvaro pascual-leone, nim tottenham, carla shatz.

Continue reading “The Nuts and Bolts of Better Brains: Harnessing the Power of Neuroplasticity” »

New research reveals hints of quantum states in tiny proteins called microtubules inside brain cells. If the results stand up, the idea that consciousness is quantum might come in from the cold.

For centuries, great thinkers have struggled to understand how people represent a personal identity that changes over time. Insight may come from a basic principle of perception: as objects become distant, they also become less discriminable or “compressed.” In Studies 1–3, we demonstrate that people’s ratings of their own personality become increasingly less differentiated as they consider more distant past and future selves. In Study 4, we found neural evidence that the brain compresses self-representations with time as well. When we peer out a window, objects close to us are in clear view, whereas distant objects are hard to tell apart. We provide evidence that self-perception may operate similarly, with the nuance of distant selves increasingly harder to perceive.

A basic principle of perception is that as objects increase in distance from an observer, they also become logarithmically compressed in perception (i.e., not differentiated from one another), making them hard to distinguish. Could this basic principle apply to perhaps our most meaningful mental representation: our own sense of self? Here, we report four studies that suggest selves are increasingly non-discriminable with temporal distance from the present as well. In Studies 1 through 3, participants made trait ratings across various time points in the past and future. We found that participants compressed their past and future selves, relative to their present self. This effect was preferential to the self and could not be explained by the alternative possibility that individuals simply perceive arbitrary self-change with time irrespective of temporal distance.

Researchers have created jellyfish whose nerve cells light up when they fire, offering a tantalizing view of neurology before the rise of the brain.

The Neuro-Network.

𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐨𝐠𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐜𝐡 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐬 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐨 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐥𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐢𝐭𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟

𝙄𝙣 1,884, 𝙬𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙚 𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙢𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙤 𝙙𝙚𝙛𝙞𝙣𝙚 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙡𝙞𝙢𝙞𝙩𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙝𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙘𝙚𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙡𝙚𝙨 𝙋𝙞𝙚𝙧𝙘… See more.

Continue reading “New metacognition research provides insight into how the brain looks at itself” »

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In this episode, Dr. Huberman is joined by Dr. David Berson, Professor and Chairman of Neuroscience at Brown University. Dr. Berson discovered the neurons in your eye that set your biological rhythms for sleep, wakefulness, mood and appetite. He is also a world-renowned teacher of basic and advanced neuroscience, having taught thousands of university lectures on this topic. Many of his students have become world-leading neuroscientists and teachers themselves.

Continue reading “Dr. David Berson: Your Brain’s Logic & Function” »