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Category: neuroscience – Page 934

Be gone flat earthism.

The nature-versus-nurture argument of intelligence just got a lot more complicated with the discovery that the environment can modify the expression of a key gene in the brain, affecting intelligence far more than we previously thought.

Such a finding may not come as a surprise if you remember that numerous genes influence our IQ and stressful experiences can lock and unlock genes in our brains. Yet having hard evidence of the link will no doubt stir debate on just what it means to be “smart”.

Researchers from the Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin analysed the characteristics of a number of genes among a group of healthy adolescents, and compared the results with intelligence scores and various neurological traits.

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Perhaps you read the stories last week (including the NYT piece linked to below) about the researchers at Johns Hopkins, led by Gul Dolen, who gave ecstasy (MDMA) to octopuses and found that they, like humans, became more social on the drug. Dr. Dolen talked about using the octopus as a model organism in neuroscience research during last Friday’s day-long workshop hosted by the NIH BRAIN 2.0 working group.

By dosing the tentacled creatures with MDMA, researchers found they share parts of an ancient messaging system involved in social behaviors with humans.

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Searching for a more direct connection between the gut and the brain, researchers were shocked to see that distance spanned by a single synapse, relaying the signal in less than 100 milliseconds, less than the blink of an eye. The finding has profound implications for the understanding of appetite and appetite suppressants, most of which target slow-acting hormones rather than fast-acting synapses.

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DeepMind is providing more research to show how neuroscience can inspire more sophisticated AI.

There’s a cognitive quirk humans have that seems deceptively elementary. For example: every morning, you see a man in his 30s walking a boisterous collie. Then one day, a white-haired lady with striking resemblance comes down the street with the same dog.

Subconsciously we immediately make a series of deductions: the man and woman might be from the same household. The lady may be the man’s mother, or some other close relative. Perhaps she’s taking over his role because he’s sick, or busy. We weave an intricate story of those strangers, pulling material from our memories to make it coherent.

This ability—to link one past memory with another—is nothing but pure genius, and scientists don’t yet understand how we do it. It’s not just an academic curiosity: our ability to integrate multiple memories is the first cognitive step that lets us gain new insight into experiences, and generalize patterns across those encounters. Without this step, we’d forever live in a disjointed world.

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Physicists face the same hard problem as neuroscientists do: the problem of bridging objective description and subjective experience. Physics has encountered consciousness. Quantum theory says an object remains in a superposition of possibilities until observed. We can consider a quantum state as being about our knowledge rather than a direct description of physical reality. The physics of information just may be that bridging of quantum-to-digital reality of subjective experience. We are now at the historic juncture when quantum computing could reveal quantum information processing underpinnings of subjectivity. Quantum mechanics is a spectacularly successful theory of fundamental physics that allows us to make probabilistic predictions derived from its mathematical formalism, but the theory doesn’t tell us precisely how these probabilities should be interpreted in regards to phenomenology, i.e. our experiential reality. There are basically three main interpretive camps within quantum mechanics from which stem at least a dozen further interpretations.

By Alex Vikoulov.

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“A quantum possibility is more real than a classical possibility, but less real than a classical reality.” –Boris Tsirelson.

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