Lifeboat Foundation

A neural circuit mechanism involved in preserving the specificity of memories has been identified by investigators from the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Regenerative Medicine and the Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI).

They also identified a genetic “switch” that can slow down #memory generalization — the loss of specific details over time that occurs in both age-related memory impairment and in post-traumatic stress disorder (#PTSD), in which emotions originally produced by traumatic experiences are elicited in response to innocuous cues that have little resemblance to the traumatic memory.

“The circuit mechanism we identified in mice allows us to preserve the precision or the details of memories over the passage of time in adult as well as aged animals,” says Amar Sahay of the MGH Center for #Regenerative Medicine and HSCI, corresponding author of a paper appearing in Nature Medicine. “These findings have implications for the generalization of traumatic memories in PTSD and for memory imprecision in #aging.”

Continue reading “Targeting levels of specific protein could improve memory in aging, reduce symptoms of PTSD” »

D rugs to vaccinate everyone over the age of 50 against Alzheimer’s could be available within 10 years, but would cost the NHS £9 billion, a new report has shown.

New analysis commissioned by Alzheimer’s Research UK found that drugs to halt, slow or reverse the disease could be available in as little as three years with major vaccine and screening programmes possible within a decade.

But dementia experts warned that demand from patients would be ‘instant and huge’ and called on the NHS to act now to make sure funds were in place for when the breakthroughs occurred.

Continue reading “Drugs to vaccinate over-50s against Alzheimer’s could be here in a decade…with a £ 9bn price tag” »

I would like to share a story. A story about sadness, depression, anger, and frustration. But most of all this is my personal story about triumphing over the death sentence of #cancer. I hope this story will give others who went through and are going through hope for the future.

My story started about 4 years ago on a cold winter day. Up until this point my life seemed invincible. That all changed. At the time I was working at the plasma center and we were preparing for an audit by the FDA. Before an audit we would have the floors waxed and make the center look as nice as possible. A few co-workers and I stayed late to help move the donor beds. I knew I had been feeling pain in my neck/shoulder area for a few weeks so I really didn’t want to. I figured it must have been from repetitive motions at work. I decided to just ignore it and help anyways: this decision changed my life dramatically.

As my coworker and I lifted a donor bed I felt a sharp pain in my neck. I could barely move my arm as it was so excruciating. I couldn’t lift my arm to my chest. I shyly let my manager know that I hurt myself. My manager had me go to Concentra #Health since I was going to be covered under worker’s compensation there. It was there I met Dr. Kreiger, one of the doctors who helped save my life.

Continue reading “My Journey With Cancer and the Hope for the Future” »

Neurotechnology would significantly increase the speed at which information is transferred from humans to machines, and a brain-systems interface may be a requirement to keep up with the pace and complexity of future combat zones.

You may have heard of Numerai — the unorthodox hedge fund that crowdsources predictive stock market models from data scientists around the world. It is now seeking more brain power and announced today that it is giving away $1 million worth of cryptocurrency to Kaggle users who sign up. The San Francisco-based hedge fund incentivizes its community members by giving them digital tokens they can stake during tournaments to express confidence in their predictions. The best trading algorithms are then selected based on how they perform on the live market, and their creators are rewarded with more tokens.

Looking at most Wall Street hedge funds’ models, it’s fair to say open, collaborative efforts aren’t at their core. Movies like Wall Street, which portrays a greedy Gordon Gekko, and The Wolf of Wall Street, which highlights the derailing decadence of power and money, paint a rather unflattering picture of egocentric traders and financiers. Numerai founder and CEO Richard Craib is looking to change that.

The 30-year-old South African wants to create a more open and decentralized ecosystem for hedge funds. Rather than restricting access to trading data, Craib encrypts it before sharing it with his global network of data scientists, which effectively prevents them stealing and replicating the trades on their own. They can, however, use the shared information to build predictive models for the hedge fund.

Continue reading “Numerai will give $1 million in crypto tokens to Kaggle users who sign up to its crowdsourced hedge fund” »

Even if a client isn’t fearful of death and doesn’t buy into the preposterous idea that his consciousness can be revived (scientists aren’t even close to figuring out how memories could possibly be preserved), having his brain preserved and uploaded as a “program” based on the idea that it is worth enough to have future generations maintain it, even interact with it, is the height of arrogance. It’s a self-centered ethos that seeks attention and admiration even after death. Transhumanism involves faith in science, sure, but that’s merely the means to the end.

Transhumanism is a religion of self, embedded with the doctrine of sola feels, all bundled into one medical procedure that literally ends your life.

By Georgi Boorman

Continue reading “Just Call Cryogenic Suicide What It Is: Selfie Death” »

One of the #brain’s mysteries is how exactly it reorganizes new #information as you learn new tasks. The standard to date was to test how neurons learned new behavior one #neuron at a time. Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh decided to try a different approach. They looked at the population of neurons to see how they worked together while #learning a new behavior. Studying the intracortical population activity in the primary motor cortex of rhesus macaques during short-term learning in a brain–computer interface (BCI) task, they were able to study the reorganization of population during learning. Their new research indicates that when the brain learns a new activity that it is less flexible than previously thought. The researchers were able to draw strong hypothesis about neural reorganization during learning by using BCI. Through the use of BCI the mapping between #neural activity and learning is completely known.

“In this experimental paradigm, we’re able to track all of the neurons that can lead to behavioral improvements and look at how they all change simultaneously,” says Steve Chase, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Carnegie Mellon and the Center for the Neural Basis of #Cognition. “When we do that, what we see is a really constrained set of changes that happen, and it leads to this suboptimal improvement of performance. And so, that implies that there are limits that constrain how flexible your brain is, at least on these short time scales.”

It is often challenging to learn new tasks quickly that require a high level of proficiency. Neural plasticity is even more constrained than previously thought as results of this research indicate.

Continue reading “The Limits of Neuroplasticity in the Brian” »

Imagine being able to treat neurodegenerative diseases and mental disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, epilepsy, PTSD, depression, and anxiety with non-invasive light-based therapy. This is the quest of pioneering scientists and researchers in optogenetics, an emerging field in biotechnology that uses light to control cells in living tissues such as neurons, in order to study brain function.

British Nobel laureate Francis Crick of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California put forth the concept of the ability to turn the firing of “one or more types of neuron on and off in the alert animal in a rapid manner” by using light as “the ideal signal” in his paper “The impact of molecular biology on neuroscience” published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in 1999. Crick noted that his concept might be somewhat “far-fetched.” Yet as improbable as it would seem to the brightest minds in science before the turn of the century, this idea was proven in a little over half a decade.

In optogenetics, scientists add genetic code to target tissue, typically a neuron, which enables it to make light-responsive proteins called opsins. Gero Miesenböck and Boris Zemelman published a study in 2002 titled “Selective photostimulation of genetically charged neurons” in Neuron. They used opsin from the retina of a fruit fly to make a neuron light-sensitive. A year later, they demonstrated the use of heterologous proteins to sensitize neurons to light [1]. Peter Hegemann, Georg Nagel and other researchers published their discovery of phototaxis and photophobic responses of green algae in 2002 [2]. In August 2005, MIT neuroscientist Ed. Boyden, PhD, along with Karl Deisseroth, Feng Zhang, Georg Nagel, and Ernst Bamberg published in Nature Neuroscience a landmark breakthrough in optogenetics, “Millisecond-timescale, genetically targeted optical control of neural activity.

Continue reading “How Light and Genetics may Treat Brain Disorders in the Future” »

Researchers are building a case that long before the nervous system works, the brain sends crucial bioelectric signals to guide the growth of embryonic tissues.