Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists have linked hundreds of genes to intelligence. One psychologist says it’s time to test school kids.

Everyone suffers from unconscious bias, but here’s an easy way to check yourself.

By Suzanne Lucas

Continue reading “Your Brain is Lying to You: Here’s How to Force it to Tell the Truth” »

Scientists found that neurons in mammalian brains were capable of producing photons of light, or “Biophotons”!

The photons, strangely enough, appear within the visible spectrum. They range from near-infrared through violet, or between 200 and 1,300 nanometers.

Scientists have an exciting suspicion that our brain’s neurons might be able to communicate through light. They suspect that our brain might have optical communication channels, but they have no idea what could be communicated.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover Biophotons In The Brain That Could Hint Our Consciousness is Directly Linked to Light!” »

Elon Musk’s neurotechnology startup Neuralink filed for permits to build an in-house machine shop and a biological testing laboratory for its facility in San Francisco last year.

The documentation on the company’s 2017 permits was retrieved by Gizmodo, which was able to access Neuralink’s public records. An excerpt of a letter submitted by Neuralink executive Jared Birchall on February 2017 to the city’s planning department gives some clues about the company’s plans for the facility’s proposed machine shop and animal testing lab.

A revolutionary new theory contradicts a fundamental assumption in neuroscience about how the brain learns. According to researchers at Bar-Ilan University in Israel led by Prof. Ido Kanter, the theory promises to transform our understanding of brain dysfunction and may lead to advanced, faster, deep-learning algorithms.

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In a paper published on March 15, 2018, in the journal Science, Stanford researchers led by Dr. Dena Leeman showed that intracellular protein aggregates accumulate within the lysosomes of neural stem cells that were previously thought not to suffer from this problem [1].

Intracellular waste disposal 101

Dysfunctional proteins and organelles within a cell constitute intracellular waste that the cell needs to dispose of. To do so, the cell may avail itself of proteasomes and lysosomes. Proteasomes are protein complexes that, with the help of enzymes, break down other, unnecessary proteins into shorter amino acids that can then be recycled to build new, useful proteins. Proteasomes are found within the cell nucleus and in the cytosol—the aqueous solution in which everything in a cell floats. The discovery of proteasomes happened later than that of lysosomes, which, for a while, were thought to be the only cellular waste management systems.

Continue reading “Clearing Protein Aggregates Boosts Neural Stem Cell Activity” »

Https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/

In the natural world, intelligence takes many forms. It could be a bat using echolocation to expertly navigate in the dark, or an octopus quickly adapting its behavior to survive in the deep ocean. Likewise, in the computer science world, multiple forms of artificial intelligence are emerging — different networks each trained to excel in a different task. And as will be presented today at the 25th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), cognitive neuroscientists increasingly are using those emerging artificial networks to enhance their understanding of one of the most elusive intelligence systems, the human brain.

“The fundamental questions cognitive neuroscientists and computer scientists seek to answer are similar,” says Aude Oliva of MIT. “They have a complex system made of components — for one, it’s called neurons and for the other, it’s called units — and we are doing experiments to try to determine what those components calculate.”

Continue reading “Artificial Brains Shed Light on the Workings of Our Own” »

A compound in beets that gives the vegetable its distinctive red color could eventually help slow the accumulation of misfolded proteins in the brain, a process that is associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Scientists say this discovery could lead to the development of drugs that could alleviate some of the long-term effects of the disease, the world’s leading cause of dementia.