Neuroscience – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Jan 13
2023

UVA Solves Mysteries About Leading Biomarker for Alzheimer’s

𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡!

𝐍𝐞𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞 𝐦𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐢𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐥𝐳𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐫’𝐬

𝙐𝙣𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙩𝙮 𝙤𝙛 𝙑𝙞𝙧𝙜𝙞𝙣𝙞𝙖 𝙣𝙚𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙨𝙘𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙨 𝙝𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙧𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙖𝙡𝙚𝙙 𝙝𝙤𝙬 𝙖 𝙩𝙤𝙭𝙞𝙘 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙖𝙪 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙩𝙚𝙞𝙣, 𝙣𝙤𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙤𝙪𝙨 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙩𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙡𝙚𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙥𝙚𝙤𝙥𝙡𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝 𝘼𝙡𝙯𝙝𝙚𝙞𝙢𝙚𝙧’𝙨 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙨𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙡 𝙤𝙩𝙝𝙚𝙧 𝙣𝙚𝙪𝙧𝙤𝙙𝙚𝙜𝙚𝙣𝙚𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙤𝙧𝙙𝙚𝙧𝙨, 𝙨𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙙𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙧𝙤𝙪𝙜𝙝 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝙖𝙨 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙙𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙚 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙚𝙨.

The new discovery advances the battle against the disease, which strikes 1 in 9 people over age 65.

Jan 13
2023

Your Expectations May Be What Get You Upset. —Featuring Matthew Kahn and Theofilos Chaldezos

As students of the Fresconean way of thinking, Theofilos Chaldezos breaks down Jacque Fresco’s lecture in this video on “Expectations, Predictability, and Subjective Behavior” with Matthew Kahn. These discussions could aid in the way of thinking that helps people live lives with less frustration, stress, and anxiety.

Chapters.
00:00 — Introduction.
2:27 — Expectations.
3:00 — Subjectivity Influencing Expectation.
6:15 — Thalamic vs. Cortical Behavior.
7:20 — Compromise.
8:11 — Take Action without Subjectivity.
10:43 — Alternative Plans.
12:57 — Insufficient Tools.
14:18 — Incremental Changes.
14:58 — Accelerating Change.
21:58 — Neural Lag.
25:02 — Simulating Values.
27:09 — Reason vs. Neural Lag.
27:54 — Convenient Alternatives.
30:09 — Competition.
30:56 — Rationality.
33:05 — One-upmanship.
34:05 — Summary from Matthew.
35:20 — Belief vs. Predictability and Expectations.
42:52 — Summary from Jacque Fresco.

The Sociocyberneering Education Project is a project which Theofilos Chaldezos developed to build enhanced skills through education. The Sociocyberneering Education Project uses a systems approach to education to allow The Venus Project to experiment and develop courses that can be used internally and externally to educate volunteers and the general public. The course offered builds a solid knowledge base that would help individuals handle teaching, present the history and the aims and proposals, and manage change towards the direction proposed by The Venus Project.

The Venus Project proposes an alternative vision of what the future can be if we apply what we already know in order to achieve a sustainable new world civilization. It calls for a straightforward redesign of our culture in which the age-old inadequacies of war, poverty, hunger, debt, and unnecessary human suffering are viewed not only as avoidable but as totally unacceptable. Anything less will result in a continuation of the same catalog of problems inherent in today’s world.

Jan 12
2023

Common brain network for psychiatric illness discovered

Psychiatric illnesses, such as schizophrenia and depression, affect nearly one in five adults in the United States and nearly half of patients diagnosed with a psychiatric illness also meet the criteria for a second. With so much overlap, researchers have begun to suspect that there may be one neurobiological explanation for a variety of psychiatric illnesses. A new study by investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, investigated four pre-existing, publicly available neurological and psychiatric datasets, and pinpointed a network of brain areas underlying psychiatric illnesses. Their results are published in Nature Human Behavior.

“Traditionally, neurology and psychiatry have different diagnostic strategies,” said corresponding author Joseph J. Taylor, MD, Ph.D., Medical Director of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation at the Brigham’s Center for Brain Circuit Therapeutics and an associate psychiatrist in the Brigham’s Department of Psychiatry. “Neurology asks: ‘Where is the lesion?’ and psychiatry asks: ‘What are the symptoms?’ We now have tools to explore the ‘where’ question for psychiatry disorders. In this study, we examined whether psychiatric disorders share a common brain network.”

The researchers began by analyzing a set of structural brain data from over 15,000 healthy controls as well as patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anxiety. They found gray matter decreases in anterior cingulate and insula, two brain regions commonly associated with psychiatric illness. However, only a third of studies showed gray matter decreases in these brain regions. Additionally, neurodegenerative diseases also showed gray matter decreases in these same regions.

Jan 12
2023

Does Our Consciousness Continue After Death?

What is the experience of death? Can one’s consciousness continue after death and if so, for how long?

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Jan 12
2023

What really happens when babies are left to cry it out?

Some parents see “sleep training” as the key to a good night’s rest. Others argue that it’s distressing for babies. What do scientists say about its risks and benefits?

Jan 12
2023

Low muscle mass is linked to cognitive decline, new study

Low muscle mass has been linked to cognitive decline with scientists suggesting that measuring muscle mass can help to identify people more at risk of dementia.

Jan 11
2023

Pets help to protect your brain as you get older

A recent study of US adults over 50 found that those who owned a pet for more than five years scored better on cognitive memory tests than those living witho…

Jan 11
2023

Automated hippocampal unfolding for morphometry and subfield segmentation with HippUnfold

Just published from my son.

Automatic hippocampus imaging, with about 20 minutes of cloud computing per scan.

Like neocortical structures, the archicortical hippocampus differs in its folding patterns across individuals. Here, we present an automated and robust BIDS-App, HippUnfold, for defining and indexing individual-specific hippocampal folding in MRI, analogous to popular tools used in neocortical reconstruction. Such tailoring is critical for inter-individual alignment, with topology serving as the basis for homology. This topological framework enables qualitatively new analyses of morphological and laminar structure in the hippocampus or its subfields. It is critical for refining current neuroimaging analyses at a meso-as well as micro-scale. HippUnfold uses state-of-the-art deep learning combined with previously developed topological constraints to generate uniquely folded surfaces to fit a given subject’s hippocampal conformation. It is designed to work with commonly employed sub-millimetric MRI acquisitions, with possible extension to microscopic resolution. In this paper, we describe the power of HippUnfold in feature extraction, and highlight its unique value compared to several extant hippocampal subfield analysis methods.

Keywords: Brain Imaging Data Standards; computational anatomy; deep learning; hippocampal subfields; hippocampus; human; image segmentation; magnetic resonance imaging; neuroscience.

Jan 11
2023

Controversy erupts over non-consensual AI mental health experiment

On Friday, Koko co-founder Rob Morris announced on Twitter that his company ran an experiment to provide AI-written mental health counseling for 4,000 people without informing them first, The Verge reports. Critics have called the experiment deeply unethical because Koko did not obtain informed consent from people seeking counseling.

On Discord, users sign into the Koko Cares server and send direct messages to a Koko bot that asks several multiple-choice questions (e.g., “What’s the darkest thought you have about this?”). It then shares a person’s concerns—written as a few sentences of text—anonymously with someone else on the server who can reply anonymously with a short message of their own.

Jan 10
2023

New research identifies a cognitive mechanism linked to reduced susceptibility to fake news

Insightfulness might play a critical role in the ability to assess the accuracy of information, according to new research published in the journal Thinking & Reasoning. The study found that people with greater insight-based problem solving skills were less likely to fall for fake news.

With rise of the internet and social media, susceptibility to misinformation has become of increasing concern. The authors of the new research sought to better understand the cognitive mechanisms associated with believing in misinformation. They were particularly interested in the role of insight-based problem solving.

“I’m a neuroscientist and study the neural correlates of creativity and idea generation, specifically how we generate ideas accompanied by ‘Aha! moments’ i.e., insights,” said study author Carola Salvi, a professor at the John Cabot University of Rome and an associate faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. “In this study, we investigated the relationship between insightfulness and aspects of social reasoning, such as believing in fake news, overclaiming, and bullshit.”