Lifeboat Foundation

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The authors measured high-resolution fMRI activity from eight individuals who saw and memorized thousands of annotated natural images over 1 year. This massive dataset enables new paths of inquiry in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

At this point, the paper mingles cosmology, or the study of the universe and its origins, with biology. “We ask whether there might be a mechanism woven into the fabric of the natural world, by means of which the universe could learn its laws,” the authors write. In other words, a universal law might transcend all scientific fields. That means that the laws of physics, as we know them, could be subject to higher-order laws of the universe that control them—and that we can’t even comprehend.

“Exploring links between fields is crucial because knowledge is not fundamentally compartmentalized,” says Bruce Bassett, professor at the University of Cape Town’s Department of Mathematics and head of the Cosmology Group at the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences in South Africa. We humans are simply narrow-minded. “We segment and compress knowledge into biology, and physics, and sociology because of our limited brains, and the cost of that segmentation and compression is that we easily miss the commonalities and hidden universality between branches of human knowledge.”

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.