Lifeboat Foundation

Alzheimer’s disease could be reversed by shining light directly into the brain through the nose and skull, scientists believe.

The first major trial to see if light therapy could be beneficial for dementia has just begun following astonishing early results which have seen people regain their memory, reading and writing skills, and orientation.

If successful it would be the first treatment to actually reverse the disease. So far, even the most hopeful drugs, such as Biogen’s aducanumab, have only managed to slow the onset of dementia, and many scientists had given up hope of reversing brain damage once it had already happened.

Specifically, AstroRx is a cell therapy product containing functional healthy astrocytes derived from human embryonic stem cells that aim to protect diseased motor neurons. The cells are injected in the patient through the spinal canal.

The company initiated its first ALS clinical trials in March 2018.

Prof. Michel Revel, founder and CEO of the company and winner of both the EMET Prize and the Israel Prize, said that the clinical trial results “provide the confidence needed to move forward” with cohorts B and C, which he said both “hold the potential for a prolonged response.”

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.@ElonMusk’s Neuralink wants to create and develop brain-machine interfaces.

As you read this line, you’re bringing each word into clear view for a brief moment while blurring out the rest, perhaps even ignoring the roar of a leaf blower outside. It may seem like a trivial skill, but it’s actually fundamental to almost everything we do. If the brain weren’t able to pick and choose what portion of the incoming flood of sensory information should get premium processing, the world would look like utter chaos—an incomprehensible soup of attention-hijacking sounds and sights.

Meticulous research over decades has found that the control of this vital ability, called selective attention, belongs to a handful of areas in the brain’s parietal and frontal lobes. Now a new study suggests that another area in an unlikely location—the temporal lobe—also steers the spotlight of attention.

The unexpected addition raises new questions in what has long been considered a settled scientific field. “The last time an attention controlling area was discovered was 30 years ago,” says Winrich Freiwald, head of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Neural Systems, who published the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on November 4, 2019, “This is a fundamental discovery that might require a rethinking of old concepts about attentional control.”

If you’re interested in mind uploading, I have a book that I highly recommend. Rethinking Consciousness is a book by Michael S. A. Graziano, who is a Princeton University professor of psychology and neuroscience.

Early in his book Graziano writes a short summary:

“This book, however, is written entirely for the general reader. In it, I attempt to spell out, as simply and clearly as possible, a promising scientific theory of consciousness — one that can apply equally to biological brains and artificial machines.”

Continue reading “Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience” »

Cardiorespiratory exercise—walking briskly, running, biking and just about any other exercise that gets your heart pumping—is good for your body, but can it also slow cognitive changes in your brain?

A study in Mayo Clinic Proceedings from the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases provides new evidence of an association between cardiorespiratory fitness and brain health, particularly in gray matter and total brain volume—regions of the brain involved with cognitive decline and aging.

Brain tissue is made up of gray matter and filaments called white matter that extend from the gray matter cells. The volume of gray matter appears to correlate with various skills and cognitive abilities. The researchers found that increases in peak oxygen uptake are strongly associated with increased gray matter volume.

“Brain activity synchronizes with sound waves, even without audible sound, through lip-reading, according to new research published in JNeurosci.”

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_re…/2020–01/sfn-htl010220.php

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Continue reading “Hearing through lip-reading” »

Neurological conditions or injuries that result in the inability to communicate can be devastating. Patients with such speech loss often rely on alternative communication devices that use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) or nonverbal head or eye movements to control a cursor to spell out words. While these systems can enhance quality-of-life, they can only produce around 5–10 words per minute, far slower than the natural rate of human speech.

Researchers from the University of California San Francisco today published details of a neural decoder that can transform brain activity into intelligible synthesized speech at the rate of a fluent speaker (Nature 10.1038/s41586-019‑1119-1).

“It has been a longstanding goal of our lab to create technology to restore communication for patients with severe speech disabilities,” explains neurosurgeon Edward Chang. “We want to create technologies that can generate synthesized speech directly from human brain activity. This study provides a proof-of-principle that this is possible.”