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Category: neuroscience – Page 777

Jeff Hawkins (Thousand Brains Theory)

The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to learn how the human brain gives rise to human intelligence and what it means to be intelligent. Understanding how the brain works is considered one of humanity’s greatest challenges.

Jeff Hawkins thinks that the reality we perceive is a kind of simulation, a hallucination, a confabulation. He thinks that our brains are a model reality based on thousands of information streams originating from the sensors in our body. Critically — Hawkins doesn’t think there is just one model but rather; thousands.

Jeff has just released his new book, A thousand brains: a new theory of intelligence. It’s an inspiring and well-written book and I hope after watching this show; you will be inspired to read it too.

Pod version: https://anchor.fm/machinelearningstreettalk/episodes/59—Je…ry-e16sb64

https://numenta.com/a-thousand-brains-by-jeff-hawkins/

The Thousand Brains Theory of Intelligence


https://numenta.com/assets/pdf/research-publications/papers/…tworks.pdf.
https://numenta.com/neuroscience-research/research-publicati…neocortex/

Your Brain Is Not an Onion With a Tiny Reptile Inside.

Continue reading “Jeff Hawkins (Thousand Brains Theory)” | >

The real Stranger Things secret government projects — including LSD mind control experiments and claims of child kidnappings

Circa 2019

STRANGER Things has attracted a global audience of over 20million viewers who love the show for its eerie plot lines involving secret government experiments and monsters from other dimensions.

But the alleged real-life stories that inspired the Netflix show — which was confirmed for a forth series on Monday - are more terrifying than anything in the fictional town of Hawkins, where the series is set.

Stranger Things stars Millie Bobby Brown and Winona Ryder and follows a group of children in the 1980s who uncover supernatural phenomena connected to a secret government laboratory in their town.

Beyond Dopamine: New Reward Circuitry Discovered

“It’s really important that we don’t think of structures in the brain as monolithic,” said Gowrishankar. “There’s lots of little nuance in brain. How plastic it is. How it’s wired. This finding is showing one way how differences can play out.”

Researchers alter two of five genes responsible for vision in Aedes aegypti to make human targets less visible to these flying insects.

People Look Alike if We Think They Have Similar Personalities

The authors add that the research informs fundamental scientific understanding of how face recognition works in the brain, suggesting that not only a face’s visual cues but also prior social knowledge plays an active role in perceiving faces.

Summary: Knowledge of an individual’s personality can influence the perception of a face’s identity and bias it toward unrelated people or identities, researchers report.

Source: NYU

Do Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber look alike? They do if you think they have similar personalities, shows a new study by a team of psychologists.

Its findings, which appear in the journal Cognition, reveal that knowledge of a person’s personality can influence the perception of a face’s identity and bias it toward unrelated identities. For example, if Vladimir Putin and Justin Bieber, a pair of faces among many tested in the research, have more similar personalities in your mind, then they visually appear more similar to you as well, even if they lack any physical resemblance.

New Molecular Computing Device Has Unprecedented Reconfigurability Reminiscent of Brain Plasticity

In a discovery published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers has described a novel molecular device with exceptional computing prowess.

Reminiscent of the plasticity of connections in the human brain, the device can be reconfigured on the fly for different computational tasks by simply changing applied voltages. Furthermore, like nerve cells can store memories, the same device can also retain information for future retrieval and processing.

“The brain has the remarkable ability to change its wiring around by making and breaking connections between nerve cells. Achieving something comparable in a physical system has been extremely challenging,” said Dr. R. Stanley Williams, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. “We have now created a molecular device with dramatic reconfigurability, which is achieved not by changing physical connections like in the brain, but by reprogramming its logic.”

Doctors Claim to Have Discovered How to Reverse Cell Aging

In order to find a way to trick the body into making new B cells, the researchers probed one of the ways that the body naturally replenishes its supply. Patients undergoing treatment for multiple sclerosis had their MBC stock depleted, at which point their body rapidly started to produce new B cells.

The team identified the specific hormones that shut B cell production down again once stores were replenished, and realized that deactivating the hormone results in the body producing extra B cells left and right. And going forward, they hope to turn that hormonal trick into a new rejuvenating treatment for the elderly and immunocompromised.

“We found specific hormonal signals produced by the old B cells, the memory cells, that inhibit the bone marrow from producing new B cells,” Melamed told The Jerusalem Post. “This is a huge discovery. It is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Microneedle patch beats baldness

Recent advances have put some interesting possibilities on the table when it comes to tackling hair loss, from topical solutions packed with stem cells, to 3D-printed hair farms, to growing hair with a patient’s own cells. Scientists in China are now throwing another one into the mix that uses a dissolvable microneedle patch to stimulate hair growth, with the technology proving high effective in mouse models of hereditary pattern baldness.

Led by scientists at China’s Zhejiang University, the researchers set out to develop new treatments for the most common of hair loss conditions: male-and female-pattern baldness, also known as androgenic alopecia. The scientists sought to tackle the issue by focusing on what they say are the primary mechanisms behind this, namely oxidative stress and poor circulation.

This relates to the combination of accumulating reactive oxygen species in the scalp that kill off the cells behind new hair growth, and a lack of blood vessels around the follicles to provide them with nutrients and essential molecules. In this way, the team hoped to come up with a two-pronged approach to androgenic alopecia, and their solution starts with previous research carried out on liver injuries and Alzheimer’s.

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