Category: neuroscience – Page 650
Does Earth Have a Mind and Agency of Its Own?
Does our planet have a mind and agency of its own? This is one of the main questions philosopher and mystic Oberon Zell illuminates in his latest masterpiece GaeaGenesis: Conception and Birth of the Living Earth. Just as we don’t see a bacterium with a naked eye, we don’t quite seem to have an innate ability to perceive the Gaian mind with a “naked” brain. As Dr. Ralph Metzner, Professor Emeritus of California Institute of Integral Studies and Founder-President of The Green Earth Foundation, writes: “Oberon Zell was the first person to conceive and publish the biological and metaphysical foundations of what has become known as the ‘Gaia Theory’ — the unified body and emergent soul of the living Earth… For over 50 years Oberon has been writing and lecturing on Gaian consciousness, and it is high time that he put it all together into a book!” And, indeed, he did.
The newly-released book takes the idea beyond the metaphorical realm postulated by James Lovelock in his “Gaia Hypothesis” and posits that the entire evolution of life on Earth is the literal embryology of a single vast living being — one replicating continuum of DNA and protoplasm. This distinction has significant implications for the subject of this book: The proposition that Mother Earth is a living, sentient being with a “soul” that humans can perceive if they are aware enough to sense it. In essence, the living beings that populate the Earth are cells within a greater macro-organism.
Here’s one of the revelatory passages from the book: To better understand the planet as a living system, we need to go beyond the time scales of human life to the planet’s own time scale, vastly greater than our own. Looked at in this way, the rhythm of day and night might be the pulse of the planet, one full cycle of every hundred thousand human heartbeats. Speeding up time appropriately, we would see the atmosphere and ocean currents swirling round the planet, circulating nutrients and carrying away waste products, much as the blood circulates nutrients and carries away waste in our own bodies.
Longevity Research is an Economic Necessity
It is vital to recognize the immediate economic importance of i nvesting in longevity and healthy-aging sciences.
Aging itself is a complex series of at least 300 biological processes involving more than 10% of our genetic makeup. It follows that methods to combat these effects must be a combination of sciences, from biotech to biophysics and pharmaceuticals. There is no single “silver bullet” solution.
Aging, along with the physical and mental decay that accompanies it, is still widely regarded as a natural and inevitable thing. It is not, it is a degenerative disease in which the physical integrity and structure of our cells decay each time they divide to replace old ones or as part of any healing process.
Scientists engineer a bacteria to produce a drug used to treat Parkinson’s disease
The results of the study could lead to new treatment options. In a groundbreaking new study published in the journal Nature on Thursday, researchers have compared the brain cells of patients who had died from either Parkinson’s disease or dementia to people unaffected by the disorders and found which brain cells are responsible for both conditions.
A team of researchers has created a bacteria that can produce a steady and consistent source of medicine inside a patient’s gut, suggesting the possibility for genetically edited bacteria to be an efficient Parkinson’s disease treatment.
Moreover, the researchers have shown via preclinical experiments that the novel treatment technique is not only safe and well-tolerated, but it also reduces side effects that can occur when other treatments are utilized.
An engineered probiotic
For long, scientists have been experimenting with ways of engineering bacteria to fit our needs for decades. The new research is the latest example of that.
Neuronal Plasticity: Scientists Show How Chronic Pain Leads to Maladaptive Anxiety
Chronic pain is persistent and inescapable, and can lead to maladaptive emotional states. It is often comorbid with psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety disorders. It is thought that chronic pain causes changes in neural circuits, and gives rise to depression and anxiety.
Researchers at Hokkaido University have identified the neuronal circuit involved in chronic pain-induced anxiety in mice. Their research, which was published on April 27, 2022, in the journal Science Advances, could lead to the development of new treatments for chronic pain and psychiatric disorders such as anxiety disorders and major depressive disorder.
“Clinicians have known for a long time that chronic pain often leads to anxiety and depression, however the brain mechanism for this was unclear,” said Professor Masabumi Minami of the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Hokkaido University, the corresponding author of the paper.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink rival Synchron starts human trials of implants
Elon Musk’s Neuralink rival Synchron has begun human trials of its brain implant that lets the wearer control a computer using thought alone.
The firm’s Stentrode brain implant, about the size of a paperclip, will be implanted in six patients in New York and Pittsburgh who have severe paralysis.
Stentrode will let patients control digital devices just by thinking and give them back the ability to perform daily tasks, including texting, emailing and shopping online.
Children of Time: How Far Does Evolution Go?
In this video we discuss, Science Fiction book, “Children of Time” By Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s the best book I’ve read this year by a long shot! It’s about evolution, consciousness, humanity’s future, and more! Also SPIDERS!
Music: Planet Gammu by Jamez Dahl.
Art:
https://www.adammiconi.com/artwork/fantasy-art/
https://cdnb.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/010/889/3…nia-x5.jpg.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/v2G1dD
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/alien-spiders.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/oOZy6q.
https://www.deviantart.com/macarious/art/super-serious-Scientist-812305030
FOLLOW QUINN ON TWITTER: Twitter: https://twitter.com/IDEASOFICE_FIRE
Three-Body Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRXGGVBzHLUfIzEhovpQJ2ENiNvJoOD2A
Lab-Grown Brain Experiment Reverses The Effects of Autism-Linked Gene
Scientists have uncovered changes in neurological structure that could underlie the autism spectrum disorder known as Pitt Hopkins syndrome, thanks to the help of lab-grown brains developed from human cells.
Furthermore, the researchers were able to recover lost genetic functions through the use of two different gene therapy strategies – hinting at the possibility of treatments that could one day give those with the condition new options in improving their quality of life.
Pitt Hopkins syndrome is a neurodevelopmental condition stemming from a mutation in a DNA-management gene called transcription factor 4 (TCF4). Classed on the autism spectrum on account of its severe impact on motor skills and sensory integration, it’s a complex condition that presents with a range of severities.
Language processing programs can assign many kinds of information to a single word, like the human brain
From search engines to voice assistants, computers are getting better at understanding what we mean. That’s thanks to language-processing programs that make sense of a staggering number of words, without ever being told explicitly what those words mean. Such programs infer meaning instead through statistics—and a new study reveals that this computational approach can assign many kinds of information to a single word, just like the human brain.
The study, published April 14 in the journal Nature Human Behavior, was co-led by Gabriel Grand, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who is affiliated with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Idan Blank Ph.D. ‘16, an assistant professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. The work was supervised by McGovern Institute for Brain Research investigator Ev Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist who studies how the human brain uses and understands language, and Francisco Pereira at the National Institute of Mental Health. Fedorenko says the rich knowledge her team was able to find within computational language models demonstrates just how much can be learned about the world through language alone.
The research team began its analysis of statistics-based language processing models in 2015, when the approach was new. Such models derive meaning by analyzing how often pairs of words co-occur in texts and using those relationships to assess the similarities of words’ meanings. For example, such a program might conclude that “bread” and “apple” are more similar to one another than they are to “notebook,” because “bread” and “apple” are often found in proximity to words like “eat” or “snack,” whereas “notebook” is not.