The “secret code” the brain uses to create a key type of memory has finally been cracked.
This type of memory, called working memory, is what allows people to temporarily hold on to and manipulate information for short periods of time. You use working memory, for example, when you look up a phone number and then briefly remember the sequence of digits in order to dial, or when you ask a friend for directions to a restaurant and then keep track of the turns as you drive there.
Summary: People with depression who responded to psilocybin therapy showed an increase in brain connectivity for up to three weeks following treatment. The increased brain connectivity was correlated with self-reported improvements in depression symptoms.
Source: Imperial College London.
Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, helps to “open up” depressed people’s brains, even after use, enabling brain regions to talk more freely to one another.
In a small trial, immune cells that fight the Epstein-Barr virus have stopped the progression of multiple sclerosis, an autoimmune condition that can lead to symptoms, such as difficulty walking, that worsen over time.
Summary: Researchers identified a genetic correlation between blood biomarkers and a range of mental health disorders. The study provides evidence some substance measures within the blood may be involved in the cause of mental illnesses. For example, immune system proteins may be involved in the development of depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia.
Source: The Conversation.
Mental health disorders including depression, schizophrenia, and anorexia show links to biological markers detected in routine blood tests, according to our new study of genetic, biochemical and psychiatric data from almost a million people.
*Based on The Cybernetic Theory of Mind eBook series (2022) by evolutionary cyberneticist Alex M. Vikoulov, available on Amazon:
as well as his magnum opus The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution (2020), available as eBook, paperback, hardcover, and audiobook on Amazon:
“You can’t explain consciousness in terms of classical physics or neuroscience alone. The best description of reality should be monistic. Quantum physics and consciousness are thus somehow linked by a certain mechanism… It is consciousness that assigns measurement values to entangled quantum states (qubits-to-digits of qualia, if you will). If we assume consciousness is fundamental, most phenomena become much easier to explain.
The Mind-Body dilemma has been known ever since René Descartes as Cartesian Dualism and later has been reformulated by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers as the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. Western science and philosophy have been trying for centuries now, rather unsuccessfully, to explain how mind emerges from matter while Eastern philosophy dismisses the hard problem of consciousness altogether by teaching that matter emerges from mind. The premise of Experiential Realism is that the latter must be true: Despite our common human intuitions, Mind over Matter proves to be valid again and again in quantum physics experiments.
From the Digital Physics perspective, particles of matter are pixels, or voxels if you prefer, on the screen of our perception. Your Universe is in consciousness. And it’s a teleological process of unfolding patterns, evolution of your core self, ‘non-local’ consciousness instantiating into the phenomenal mind for the duration of a lifetime.
Collective dynamics are ubiquitous in the natural world. From neural circuits to animal groups, there are countless instances in which the interactions among large numbers of elementary units bestow surprisingly complex patterns of tantalizing beauty on the collective. One of the longstanding goals of researchers in many fields is to understand behaviors of a large group of individual units by monitoring the actions of a single unit. For example, an ornithologist can learn many things about the behaviors of a flock by monitoring only a single bird.
Of greater difficulty is understanding the size of a collection of units by observing a single unit. No matter how many birds one tags with monitoring equipment, one can never be assured of having tagged the entire flock. Yet, while the ability to calculate the size of a collective from individual behaviors would be a key tool for any field, there are only a handful of recent papers trying to tackle the seemingly unsolvable problem.
In a newly published study appearing in Communications Physics, investigators led by Maurizio Porfiri, Institute Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, and a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering; and Pietro De Lellis of the University of Naples, Italy, offer a paradigm to solve this problem, one that builds upon precepts that can be traced back to the work of Einstein.
The new results, taken from two combined studies, reveal that people who responded to psilocybin-assisted therapy showed increased brain connectivity not just during their treatment, but up to three weeks afterwards. This “opening up” effect was associated with self-reported improvements in their depression.
Psilocybin, the psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, helps to “open up” depressed people’s brains, even weeks after use, a study has found.
These are the findings of a new analysis of brain scans from close to 60 people receiving treatment for depression, led by Imperial College London’s Centre for Psychedelic Research. The team behind the study believes it may have untangled how psilocybin exerts its therapeutic effects on the brain.
Psilocybin is one of a number of psychedelics being explored as a potential therapy for psychiatric disorders. Several studies have trialled a synthesised form of the drug to treat patients with depression and anxiety, with promising results.
The goal of this virtual workshop is to discuss whether microbial pathogens may represent a causal component of Alzheimer’s disease, review knowledge gaps, and establish scientific priorities to address these gaps. The workshop discussed gaps in current knowledge and explored new opportunities for research in the areas intersecting infectious organisms and Alzheimer’s disease.
Summary: Brain mapping study reveals memory engrams are widely distributed throughout the brain, including among regions not previously realized.
Source: picower institute for learning and memory.
A new study by scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides the most comprehensive and rigorous evidence yet that the mammalian brain stores a single memory across a widely distributed, functionally connected complex spanning many brain regions, rather than in just one or even a few places.
