Objective reality exists, but what can you know about it that isn’t subjective. According to some neuroscientists, not much.
No one can stay awake forever. While we’re awake, our need for sleep gradually increases. If we deprive ourselves of sleep, our brain functions – such as attention or judgement – are impaired, and sleep becomes irresistible. No matter whether we are on a couch or at work – if we ignore our need for sleep, we ultimately crash.
Although sleep is vital, until now it hasn’t been known which structure of the brain tells us when we are tired. But our recent study has shown in laboratory mice that the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for the most complex brain functions – including perception, language, thought and episodic memory – helps us track our need for sleep.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The crucial relationship between PTSD and the body.
A large study of military personnel suggests needed diagnostic updates.
It is quickly becoming a hot topic among machine learning experts and those concerned with AI safety.
One of us (Anders) has a background in computational neuroscience, and now works with groups such as the AI Objectives Institute, where we discuss how to avoid such problems with AI; the other (Thomas) studies history, and the various ways people have thought about both the future and the fate of civilization throughout the past. After striking up a conversation on the topic of wireheading, we both realized just how rich and interesting the history behind this topic is.
“You may hit the tipping point when you’re 50; it may happen when you’re 80; it may never happen,” Schindler said. “But once you pass the tipping point, you’re going to accumulate high levels of amyloid that are likely to cause dementia. If we know how much amyloid someone has right now, we can calculate how long ago they hit the tipping point and estimate how much longer it will be until they are likely to develop symptoms.”
Summary: A new algorithm uses neuroimaging data of amyloid levels in the brain and takes into account a person’s age to determine when a person with genetic Alzheimer’s risk factors, and with no signs of cognitive decline, will develop the disease.
Source; WUSTL
Continue reading “Time Until Dementia Symptoms Appear Can Be Estimated via Brain Scan” »
In this podcast, I have invited Daniel Jue, one of the youngest Entrepreneurs of the field of AGI. Daniel is an Independent Artificial General Intelligence researcher at Cognami in the US. He has worked supporting the US Department of Defense, including Data Fusion and analytic development for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose mission is to prevent technological surprise by potential adversaries. In addition he worked with scientists and engineers at IronNet CyberSecurity, a startup with DARPA and NSA heritage who have recently gone public. In March of 2,021 Daniel took on full time AGI research, drawing upon the fields of Computer Science, Neuroscience, Philosophy and Psychology. Some of his major influences have been Jacques Pitrat’s CAIA (An Artificial AI Scientist) project, Jean Piaget’s childhood development theories and Spiking Neural Networks. He sees a generalizable substrate at the basis for AGI, where engineers design the “physics” in which intelligent behavior could emerge.
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Summary: A newly identified gene therapy pathway has the potential to protect us against dementia and cancer, researchers report.
Source: University of Sheffield.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered a new gene therapy pathway that has uncovered an important regulatory mechanism to keep our genome healthy. This pathway has the potential to protect us against serious life-limiting diseases such as cancer and dementia.
Summary: Researchers identified specific receptors for acetylcholine that reroute information flow through memory circuits in the hippocampus. The findings could have implications for the development of drugs to help enhance or protect memory from diseases associated with cognitive decline.
Source: University of Bristol.
Bristol-led research has identified specific drug targets within the neural circuits that encode memories, paving the way for significant advances in the treatment of a broad spectrum of brain disorders.
Watch the full documentary on Vimeo on demand: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/339083
The study of consciousness needs to be lifted out of the mysticism that has dominated it. Consciousness is not just a matter of philosophy or spirituality. It’s a matter of hard science. It’s a matter of understanding the brain and the mind — a pattern structure made out of information. It’s also a matter of engineering. If we can understand the functionality of the brain, its neural code, then we can build the same functionality into our computer systems. There’s no consensus on what produces consciousness, but everyone regardless of metaphysical views can agree what it is like to be conscious. Given that consciousness is subjectivity, what consciousness is like is what consciousness is.
A new Rutgers study will examine how COVID-19 is affecting individuals in a number of cognitive-related areas, including memory loss, “brain fog,” and dementia.
“Many people who recover from mild or moderate COVID-19 notice slowed thinking or memory loss, and this motivated us to leverage our experience in studying cognitive issues related to Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and HIV to examine this phenomenon,” said Dr. William T. Hu, associate professor and chief of cognitive neurology at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research.
A leading cognitive neurologist and neuroscientist, Dr. Hu is spearheading the characterization of cognitive impairment following mild-to-moderate COVID-19 at Rutgers.
