Summary: A ten-minute run increases activation of the bilateral prefrontal cortex, improving mood and cognitive function.
Source: University of Tsukuba
Running may be a useful activity to undertake for better mental health. University of Tsukuba researchers have found that only ten minutes of moderate-intensity running increases local blood flow to the various loci in the bilateral prefrontal cortex —the part of the brain that plays an important role in controlling mood and executive functions.
Are we there already?
Less than a year has passed since we saw Pager play Ping-Pong using Neuralink. The company’s owner, Elon Musk has now said that he is confident of testing the chip in humans next year.
Founded in July 2016, the company is busy building an implantable chip that will allow the human brain to interact with computers directly. The company made headlines when its experimental macaque played Ping-Pong telepathically, without the help of a joystick. The company seems to have made rapid progress in its technology since its founder is quite optimistic about human testing.
Although there is no official communiqué from Neuralink, a stock investor on Twitter quoted Musk to say that the company was planning to test the chip soon. The tweet that tagged both Musk and Neuralink said that Musk was “cautiously optimistic” about restoring full-body functionality for tetraplegics & quadriplegics.
What if the next global health crisis is a mental health pandemic? It is here now.
According to Gallup, anger, stress, worry and sadness have been on the rise globally for the past decade — long before the COVID-19 pandemic — and all reached record highs in 2020.
People die from COVID-19 — they also die from depression and anxiety disorders. The U.S. has seen spikes in deaths from suicide and “deaths of despair.”
Deaths of despair — a new designation made prominent by Princeton economists Anne Case and Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton in their book of the same name — are suicides and deaths caused by fatal behaviors such as drug overdoses and liver failure from chronic alcohol consumption. They have particularly harmed working-class males in the American heartland and increased dramatically since the mid-1990s, from about 65,000 in 1995 to 158,000 in 2018.
Think of deaths of despair as suicide in slow motion.
Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll joins us to discuss whether it make sense to think of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, and whether contemporary physics points in this direction.
We discussed Sean’s essay responding to Philip’s book ‘Galileo’s Error,’ and Philip’s counter-response essay. Both are available here: https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2021/08/01/19-essays-on-galileos-error/
We also discussed Philip’s Scientific American article making the case that the move from the fine-tuning to the multiverse commits the ‘inverse gambler’s fallacy’: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-improbable-ex…20we%20are, with%20the%20existence%20of%20life.
Finally, Keith and Philip discussed the PhilPapers 2020 survey of philosophers’ opinions on philosophical questions, which is linked to from this blog post of Philip’s: https://conscienceandconsciousness.com/2021/11/01/materialis…only-just/
Science isn’t all lab coats and test tubes. Beautiful visuals can engage people—especially students—and inspire them to learn about science more broadly.
Scientists have often invited the public to see what they see, using everything from engraved woodblocks to electron microscopes to explore the complexity of the scientific enterprise and the beauty of life. Sharing these visions through illustrations, photography, and videos has allowed laypeople to explore a range of discoveries, from new bird species to the inner workings of the human cell.
As a neuroscience and bioscience researcher, I know that scientists are sometimes pigeonholed as white lab coats obsessed with charts and graphs. What that stereotype misses is their passion for science as a mode of discovery. That’s why scientists frequently turn to awe-inducing visualizations as a way to explain the unexplainable.
The BioArt Scientific Image and Video Competition, administered by the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology images with the public that are rarely seen outside the laboratory in order to introduce and educate laypeople about the wonder often associated with biological research. BioArt and similar contests reflect the lengthy history of using imagery to elucidate science.
Scientists have found a way to interpret jellyfish’s thoughts regardless of not having any neurons, study finds.
They were able to observe how well the cells in a tiny type of see-through jellyfish operate collectively, to produce complicated independent motions, such as capturing and consuming food source. This is all thanks to ingenious molecular manipulation.
Boyden’s award-winning research has led to tools that can activate or silence neurons with light, enabling the causal assessment of how specific neurons contribute to normal and pathological brain functions.
Ed Boyden is the founder and principal investigator of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The group develops tools for controlling and observing the dynamic circuits of the brain, and uses these neurotechnologies to understand how cognition and emotion arise from brain network operation, as well as to enable systematic repair of intractable brain disorders such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic pain.
Many disorders of the brain currently are treated with drugs or electrical stimulation. Nearly a quarter of million people have implanted electrical probes in their brains for such stimulation. The problem with this approach is that it targets large areas of the brain instead of the discrete cells or location that cause the disorder. Boyden works on implementing light-stimulated processes in the brain to address these disorders at the cellular level. The method utilizes adeno-associated viruses (AAV) to create light-sensitive centers in the brain which can then be stimulated by light pulses. Very small optical waveguides (fibers) can then be introduced in the brain to stimulate these sites.
Boyden was named to the “Top 35 Innovators Under the Age of 35″ by Technology Review and to the “Top 20 Brains Under Age 40″ by Discover, and has received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, the Society for Neuroscience Research Award for Innovation in Neuroscience, and the Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, as well as numerous other recognitions. In early 2011, he was an invited speaker at the renowned TED conference, sharing the bill with a high-powered lineup that included presenters as diverse as Bill Gates and choreographer Julie Taymor.
He has contributed numerous articles to SPIE Proceedings, and was an invited speaker at the Biomedical Optics Hot Topics Session at SPIE Photonics West 2011.