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Wearable microscopes show HD images of pain processed

The study authors claim their microscope can provide colored real-time images of hard-to-reach parts of the spinal cord that couldn’t be accessed previously.

Pain is a powerful feeling but have you ever wondered how pain works on a cellular level? Well, a team of scientists at the San Diego-based Salk Insitute has actually figured out a way to see the internal neural mechanism associated with pain.

In their recently published study, they propose wearable microscopes using which they were able to check how nerve cells in the spinal cord of mice process pain signals.


Salk Institute.

Scientists unlock effect of psychedelic drug DMT on the human brain

The powerful psychedelic can give you a near-death experience. Here is how it affects your brain on the inside.

Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, is a powerful psychedelic whose effect on the human brain lasts for only some minutes, but in that short span of time, the user experiences some high-level mental changes.

The researchers examined the brain activity of the participants before, during, and after the DMT test. Here is what they found.


Agsandrew/iStock.

For the first time, a team of researchers from the Imperial College of London has monitored these changes in detail. They administered a high dose of DMT to 20 healthy individuals who voluntarily participated in their study.

The illusion of consciousness | Dan Dennett

http://www.ted.com Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don’t we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world’s leading thinkers and doers are invited to give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, politics and the arts. Watch the Top 10 TEDTalks on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/top10

Is Free Will an Illusion? What Can Cognitive Science Tell Us?

Daniel Dennett.
May 14, 2014

Serious thinkers contend that free will cannot exist in a deterministic universe — one in which events are the singular outcomes of the conditions in which they occur. The alternative view, that free will is prerequisite for personal responsibility and morality, is the basis of our legal and religious institutions. Philosopher Daniel Dennett unravels this conundrum and asks whether we must jettison one of these notions, or whether they can co-exist. He then asks: if free will is an illusion, as many scientists say, should we conclude that we don’t need real free will to be responsible for our actions?

Daniel Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and Director, Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Free Will is Impossible. Interview with Derk Pereboom

Derk Pereboom claims that free will is impossible because of its incompatibility with both determinism and indeterminism. Also he defends a robust nonreductive physicalism. It says that although consciousness can’t be reduced to physical it’s not something over and above physical.
The interview was taken by Vadim Vasiliev and Dmitry Volkov. Below you’ll see a list of questions of the interview.
1. The most influential books.
2. What are the differences between notions of moral responsibility and basic desert?
3. Which type of punishment should be eliminated if we find out that there is no justification for basic desert?
4. Is indignation as a reaction on wrongdoing a kind of irrational emotion?
5. How was the manipulation argument invented?
6. Why you’ve recently changed a presentation of the first case of Manipulation Argument?
7. How does the problem of free will relate to the problem of mental causation?
8. Could the problem of personal identity pose difficulties for moral responsibility and for basic desert? And why causal determinism is at the focus of free will debate?
9. Is there a real difference between hard incompatibilist’s position and that of compatibilists?
10. Can you list or name some differences and similarities between you and Daniel Dennett?
11. Could cognitive science and neuroscience eliminate the discussion on free will?
12. What is a definition of mental?
13. What were the most important changes of your views?
14. What is meaning of life?
15. What is your current research?

How DMT Psychedelic Alters Perception of Reality

Summary: The psychedelic compound DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) increases connectivity across the brain, allowing for greater communication between different areas and networks. The brain changes are most prominent in brain areas linked to higher functioning, such as imagination.

Source: Imperial College London.

Scientists have gleaned new insights into how psychedelics alter conscious experience via their action on brain activity.

Biologists Figured Out How to Generate New Neurons in the Adult Brain, Revolutionizing Neurodegenerative Disease Research

Recently biologists discovered how to generate new neurons in the adult brain. This is an incredible breakthrough that has enormous potential to revolutionize neurodegenerative disease research. By generating genetically-mutated mice with a unique gene that activates dormant neural stem cells, scientists were able to generate new neurons in the brain. For years, scientists have been searching for ways to promote the growth of new neurons in the brain, especially in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. This new discovery could lead to new treatments and therapies that could help to restore brain function and improve the quality of life for millions of people around the world.

Leslie Samuel, founder of Interactive Biology, gives some context for the importance of genetic trading between organisms for scientific research, and notes how the loss of nerve cells in the brain is one of the hallmarks of neurodegenerative diseases. The ability to generate new neurons in the adult brain could be a game-changer in the field of neurology.

Leslie’s Thoughts

Consciousness Began When the Gods Stopped Speaking

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone voice. He was in his early 50s, a fairly heavy drinker, untenured, and apparently uninterested in tenure. His position was marginal. “I don’t think the university was paying him on a regular basis,” recalls Roy Baumeister, then a student at Princeton and today a professor of psychology at Florida State University. But among the youthful inhabitants of the dorm, Jaynes was working on his masterpiece, and had been for years.

From the age of 6, Jaynes had been transfixed by the singularity of conscious experience. Gazing at a yellow forsythia flower, he’d wondered how he could be sure that others saw the same yellow as he did. As a young man, serving three years in a Pennsylvania prison for declining to support the war effort, he watched a worm in the grass of the prison yard one spring, wondering what separated the unthinking earth from the worm and the worm from himself. It was the kind of question that dogged him for the rest of his life, and the book he was working on would grip a generation beginning to ask themselves similar questions.

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, when it finally came out in 1976, did not look like a best-seller. But sell it did. It was reviewed in science magazines and psychology journals, Time, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. It was nominated for a National Book Award in 1978. New editions continued to come out, as Jaynes went on the lecture circuit. Jaynes died of a stroke in 1997; his book lived on. In 2000, another new edition hit the shelves. It continues to sell today.