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Category: neuroscience – Page 662

A discussion with Dr. Nir Barzaili on Age Later

Ever wonder why some 90-year olds don’t seem to slow down and seem. to retain the mental and physical capacity of someone half their age?
Do they have good genes? Or is there a way that all of us can get older without getting old?

That’s what Dr. Nir Barzilai, founder of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, set out to answer in his book, Age Later.

Dr. Nir joined us for a live Q + A discussion on Zoom.
Whether you’ve read Age Later or not, you won’t want to miss this. Because by the end of the discussion, you’ll know how to turn back the clock on aging.

Listen to the Longevity by Design podcast episode with Dr. Nir’s on genetics and lifestyle factors of centenarians here: https://hubs.li/Q01rqsV-0
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Qatar 2022 FIFA World Cup: Technologically advanced stadiums will cater to the needs of specially-abled

The stadiums include a quiet room for those with cognitive disabilities.

The FIFA World Cup to be held in Qatar this year is leading the way in accessibility for specially-abled people, according to a report by Euronews.

The technologically advanced stadiums aren’t only wheelchair accessible, other amenities have also been included, such as a quiet room for those suffering from autism and other cognitive disabilities. The room is meant to give a safe haven for those overwhelmed by the World Cup’s loud crowds.

Clever Machines Learn How to Be Curious

“You can think of curiosity as a kind of reward which the agent generates internally on its own, so that it can go explore more about its world,” Agrawal said. This internally generated reward signal is known in cognitive psychology as “intrinsic motivation.” The feeling you may have vicariously experienced while reading the game-play description above — an urge to reveal more of whatever’s waiting just out of sight, or just beyond your reach, just to see what happens — that’s intrinsic motivation.

Humans also respond to extrinsic motivations, which originate in the environment. Examples of these include everything from the salary you receive at work to a demand delivered at gunpoint. Computer scientists apply a similar approach called reinforcement learning to train their algorithms: The software gets “points” when it performs a desired task, while penalties follow unwanted behavior.

Rats bopping to the beat in video demonstrate innate beat synchronization in animals for the first time

Rats love to dance 🕺:3

The team had two alternate hypotheses: The first was that the optimal music tempo for beat synchronicity would be determined by the time constant of the body. This is different between species and much faster for compared to humans (think of how quickly a rat can scuttle). The second was that the optimal tempo would instead be determined by the time constant of the brain, which is surprisingly similar across species.

“After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat synchronization depends on the time constant in the brain,” said Takahashi. “This demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in elucidating the perceptual mechanisms of music.”

The rats were fitted with wireless, miniature accelerometers, which could measure the slightest head movements. Human participants also wore accelerometers on headphones. They were then played one-minute excerpts from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, at four different tempos: Seventy-five percent, 100%, 200% and 400% of the original speed.

Don’t understand Elon Musk? Here’s the theory that makes simple sense of a complicated man

This describes the essential Musk — with the caveat that it leaves out his autism and emotional fragility. He has the right philosophy and the brains to make serious progress, but with some surprisingly unexpected naïve schoolboy level mistakes and misunderstandings about human nature. Regardless, he will learn from them.

We may have cracked the code.

New Drug Reverses Neural and Cognitive Effects of a Concussion

ISRIB, a tiny molecule identified by University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) researchers can repair the neural and cognitive effects of concussion in mice weeks after the damage, according to a new study.

ISRIB blocks the integrated stress response (ISR), a quality control process for protein production that, when activated chronically, can be harmful to cells.

The study, which was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that ISRIB reverses the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) on dendritic spines, an area of neurons vital to cognition. The drug-treated mice also showed sustained improvements in working memory.

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