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Category: neuroscience – Page 625

Rewiring the Brain: The Promise and Peril of Neuroplasticity

Human enhancement has long been depicted as having the potential to help but also harm humanity. Brian Greene talks with Neuroscientists Takao Hensch, John Krakauer and Entrepreneur Brett Wingeier about their experiments using brain plasticity to heal illness, improve cognitive and athletic performance. They also raise warning flags about the race to build a more perfect human.

This program is part of the Big Ideas series, supported by the John Templeton Foundation.

Participants:
John Krakauer.
Takao Hensch.
Brett Wingeier.

Moderator:
Brian Greene.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS on this program through a short survey:
https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/7242995/Rewriting-the-Brain.

WSF Landing Page Link: https://www.worldsciencefestival.com/programs/rewiring-the-b…lasticity/

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The future is now: Elon Musk says Neuralink is ready for human testing

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has developed a technology that can link human brains to computers, and according to Musk, it is now ready for human testing. This groundbreaking technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate and interact with machines, and could pave the way for new treatments for neurological disorders. With the announcement that Neuralink is ready for human testing, the future of human-computer integration is closer than ever before.

#neuralink #elonmusk #braincomputerinterface #humanenhancement #neurotechnology #futurismo #transhumanisme #neuroscience #innovation #technews #mindcontrol #cyborgs #neurologicaldisorders #futuretechnology #humanpotential #ai #neuralengineering #brainimplants #humanmachineinterface #brainresearch #brainwavesound

Does God emerge from Boltzmann Brains in the fabric of reality?

The concept of Boltzmann Brain — a self-aware entity that emerges from random fluctuations in the fabric of reality— is intriguing. Perhaps God emerges from the evolution of a cosmic society of Boltzmann Brains?

I am referring to a generic “fabric of reality” but the concept can be formulated more precisely. For example, imagine a conscious, thinking being arising from random quantum fluctuations in the vacuum.

In the delightful “The Gravity Mine” short story, Stephen Baxter imagines the birth of a Boltzmann Brain:

Things I have (sort of) changed my mind on (2): Life and consciousness

Here’s another thing I have changed my mind on. Well, sort of. I used to make fun of “vitalism” and trade insults with my favorite archenemy Dale Carrico. Now I must repent or at least add important qualifications.

Vitalism is currently defined by Wikipedia as “the belief that living organisms are fundamentally different from non-living entities because they contain some non-physical element or are governed by different principles than are inanimate things.”

If we eliminate a few words from this definition we are left with a statement that I don’t disagree with:

Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish

Recent advances in human stem cell-derived brain organoids promise to replicate critical molecular and cellular aspects of learning and memory and possibly aspects of cognition in vitro. Coining the term “organoid intelligence” (OI) to encompass these developments, we present a collaborative program to implement the vision of a multidisciplinary field of OI. This aims to establish OI as a form of genuine biological computing that harnesses brain organoids using scientific and bioengineering advances in an ethically responsible manner. Standardized, 3D, myelinated brain organoids can now be produced with high cell density and enriched levels of glial cells and gene expression critical for learning. Integrated microfluidic perfusion systems can support scalable and durable culturing, and spatiotemporal chemical signaling.

Modifying messenger RNA may provide a new target for Alzheimer’s disease

Reducing the methylation of a key messenger RNA can promote migration of macrophages into the brain and ameliorate symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in a mouse model, according to a new study publishing March 7 in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Rui Zhang of Air Force Medical University in Xian, Shaanxi, China. The results illuminate one pathway for entrance of peripheral immune cells into the brain, and may provide a new target for treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

A presumed trigger for the development of Alzheimer’s disease is the accumulation of proteinaceous, extracellular amyloid-beta plaques in the brain. High levels of amyloid-beta in mice leads to neurodegeneration and cognitive symptoms reminiscent of human Alzheimer’s disease, and reduction of amyloid-beta is a major goal in development of new treatments.

One potential pathway for getting rid of amyloid-beta is the of blood-derived into the brain, and their maturation into macrophages, which, along with resident microglia, can consume amyloid-beta. That migration is a complex phenomenon controlled by multiple interacting players, but a potentially important one is the methylation of messenger RNA within the cells.

A wearable device that records single-neuron activity while humans are walking

New technologies can greatly advance research in various fields, including medicine and neuroscience. In recent years, for instance, engineers have created increasingly sophisticated devices to record brain activity and other biological signals with high precision.

A multi-disciplinary research team at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and other institutes in the U.S. have recently developed the Neuro-stack, a new wearable technology that can record the activity of single neurons in the as a human being is walking or moving. This device, presented in a paper published in Nature Neuroscience, could help to gather valuable insight about neuronal activity during walking, while also potentially improving treatments for brain disorders.

“Our study was motivated by the need for smaller size and more for clinical neuroscience,” Dejan Markovic, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Medical Xpress. “Our primary objectives were to make a device that is small enough to be wearable, for mobile experiments, and to provide broadband recordings including local field potentials and single units.”

Brain Criticality — Optimizing Neural Computations

To try everything Brilliant has to offer—free—for a full 30 days, visit http://brilliant.org/ArtemKirsanov/.
The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

My name is Artem, I’m a computational neuroscience student and researcher. In this video we talk about the concept of critical point – how the brain might optimize information processing by hovering near a phase transition.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/artemkirsanov.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArtemKRSV

OUTLINE:
00:00 Introduction.
01:11 — Phase transitions in nature.
05:05 — The Ising Model.
09:33 — Correlation length and long-range communication.
13:14 — Scale-free properties and power laws.
20:20 — Neuronal avalanches.
25:00 — The branching model.
31:05 — Optimizing information transmission.
34:06 — Brilliant.org.
35:41 — Recap and outro.

The book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262544030/the-cortex-and-the-critical-point/

REFERENCES (in no particular order):

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