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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 905

Jul 4, 2016

Quantum physics and consciousness

Posted by in categories: neuroscience, quantum physics

According to this theory, nothing really happens in physical world. Physical world is just a manifestation of the our consciousness. It seems that ancient Indian yogis have always known this. They have always believed in supreme consciousness which runs cosmos.

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Jul 2, 2016

Are You In A Leadership Role? Here’s What You Need To Know About Your Brain

Posted by in category: neuroscience

In my work, I talk a lot about how to reduce fear in the workplace and structure full engagement. The HeartMath Institute’s work brings to light a key component of this type of leadership. When I speak about things like recruiting based on company values, aligning people with an emotionally compelling mission and vision, creating an environment of safety and belonging, frequently recognizing and celebrating achievements so that people know they matter…I am also talking about how to engage the hearts of your people. Engaging the heart is a key component of evolving a “Smart State”. It’s time to consider the heart brain at work.

Christine Comaford is the author of SmartTribes: How Teams Become Brilliant Together.

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Jul 2, 2016

Could ‘Zaps’ to the Brain Help Fight Glaucoma?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience

FRIDAY, July 1, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Electrical pulses to the brain may help restore vision in some partially blind patients, German researchers report.

Glaucoma and other types of damage to the eye’s optic nerve typically cause permanent damage. But, the new technique appears to kick-start the brain’s visual control centers, the researchers explained.

A 10-day treatment regimen — entailing upwards of nearly an hour a day of electrical pulses aimed directly into the eye — improved vision among patients who were losing their sight, the researchers said.

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Jul 2, 2016

New Gaming Software Hopes to Train Brain to Resist Sweets

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, food, health, neuroscience

Games to help fight obesity?


Innovative research uses technology to help people with a sweet-tooth lose weight. Researchers believe they can train the brain to better resist temptation and warn people of an unhealthy urge before the temptation occurs.

Specifically, Drexel University psychologists have created a computer game aimed at improving users’ inhibitory control. Additionally, the investigators are also rolling out a mobile app that used in conjunction with the Weight Watchers app, will alert users on unhealthy urges before they strike.

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Jul 2, 2016

Treating psychiatric disorders through neuron stimulation

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

But those don’t address the electrical circuitry at work in the brain, which scientists hope will provide a more precise option for treatment.

“We’ve focused a lot on the chemical side, because in the mid-20th century, we began to develop the first medications that affected neurotransmitters,” said Dr. Darin Dougherty, director of the division of neurotherapeutics and the department of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. “The other side, the electrical, that’s been less exploited as a treatment potential.”

Dougherty and others are working to change that. With funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, scientists are working to build new ways to treat psychiatric disorders, like PTSD, through deeper understandings of the electrical signals in our brains.

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Jul 2, 2016

MND: Your Daily Dose of Counter-Theory

Posted by in categories: mathematics, neuroscience

Thomas Aquinas and other ludicrous pseudo-philosophers (in contradistinction with real philosophers such as Abelard) used to ponder questions about angels, such as whether they can interpenetrate (as bosons do).

Are today’s mathematicians just as ridiculous? The assumption of infinity has been “proven” by the simplest reasoning ever: if n is the largest number, clearly, (n+1) is larger. I have long disagreed with that hare-brained sort of certainty, and it’s not a matter of shooting the breeze. (My point of view has been spreading in recent years!) Just saying something exists, does not make it so (or then one would believe Hitler and Brexiters). If I say:” I am emperor of the galaxy known as the Milky Way!” that has a nice ring to it, but it does not make it so (too bad, that would be fun).

Given n symbols, each labelled by something, can one always find a new something to label (n+1) with? I say: no. Why? Because reality prevents it. Somebody (see below) objected that I confused “map” and “territory”. But I am a differential geometer, and the essential idea there, from the genius B. Riemann, is that maps allow to define “territory”:

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Jul 2, 2016

Novel Biomaterial Developed for Injectable Neuronal Control

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A light-activated injectable device that could eventually be used to stimulate nerve cells and manipulate the behavior of muscles and organs has been developed.

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Jul 1, 2016

Research team reproduces major functional principles of the brain using technology

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience, robotics/AI

How does the human brain collect, process and store the flow of data which it constantly encounters? How does it manage cognitive tasks, which require complex interaction between various areas of the brain and overload high performance computers that work much more quickly? Why can the brain cope with all of this using much less energy? It is the aim of the research team from Kiel led by Professor Hermann Kohlstedt, Head of the Nanoelectronics Department at Kiel University (CAU) and spokesman of the national collaborative research project “Memristive devices for neural systems” (FOR 2093) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) to track this impressive efficiency of the human brain using technology and to implement its method of operation in artificial neural networks. The scientists from Kiel have now succeeded in electronically reproducing two fundamental principles of operation of the human brain, memory and synchronisation. They recently published their results in Applied Physics Letters.

The is a master of energy efficiency. It has approximately 100 billion nerve cells, also known as neurons, which manage with power of only about 20 Watt. Modern high performance computers would require many thousands of times more energy to perform similarly complex calculations as the brain manages. The neurons in the brain are linked to each other with synapses and form a highly complex network. The term “learning” in the neurological sense means that the synaptic connections in the brain are not determined statically. Instead they are continually readjusting on the basis of environmental influences, for example sensations. This makes it possible to store new memory content locally, known as the neurological plasticity of the brain.

In addition to the spatial ability of the neural connections to adjust, there is another important building block to process information in the brain: the synchronisation of neural groups. Electrical impulses, so-called action potentials, form the basic unit of information processing in the brain. These impulses permanently transmit information between the neurons and in doing so they cross and influence the synaptic connections in the brain. “In the case of conscious sensory perceptions the spatial irregular occurrence of neural impulses changes into ordered structures suddenly and for a limited time,” says Professor Thorsten Bartsch, a neurologist at Kiel University and member of the research group. The previously independent impulses of the neurons synchronise themselves in this case even over areas of the brain that are not close together. Evidence of this synchronised “firing” in humans can also be shown by measuring brain waves (electroencephalography, EEG).

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Jul 1, 2016

The World’s First Human Brain-to-Brain Interface

Posted by in categories: internet, neuroscience

[3:19] Rajesh Rao and Andrea Stocco test the first human brain-to-brain interface, allowing the brain to be controlled over the internet. When Rajesh plays a video game and thinks about firing at a target, the EEG picks up the signal and sends it across the internet, the Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS stimulates the region of Andrea’s brain that controls hand movement. This causes Andrea’s index finger to fire the cannon and blow up the target. [Source: World Science Festival YouTube link] Comments.

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Jul 1, 2016

Scientists say they’ve developed aspirin that crosses the blood-brain barrier

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health, neuroscience

One of the biggest challenges in treating brain cancer has been getting drugs to cross the blood-brain barrier and attack tumours where they’re needed.

But scientists say they’ve now developed a truly soluble liquid aspirin that can make its way into the brain, and, in the lab at least, kill cancerous glioblastoma cells without harming healthy brain tissue.

The research hasn’t been published in a peer-reviewed journal as yet, so we need to take it with a big pinch of salt for now. But scientists from the Brain Tumour Research Centre at the University of Portsmouth in the UK just presented it at the Brain Tumours 2016 conference in Poland.

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