Posted in futurism
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The Anatomy of Pain.
In this video, Justin from the Institute of Human Anatomy discusses the anatomy pain, and shows the various structured associated with its transmission and processing.
Cool Stuff.
More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”
Since Galileo’s time the physical sciences have leaped forward, explaining the workings of the tiniest quarks to the largest galaxy clusters. But explaining things that reside “only in consciousness”—the red of a sunset, say, or the bitter taste of a lemon—has proven far more difficult. Neuroscientists have identified a number of neural correlates of consciousness —brain states associated with specific mental states—but have not explained how matter forms minds in the first place. As philosopher David Chalmers asked: “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?” He famously dubbed this quandary the “hard problem” of consciousness.
Scholars recently gathered to debate the problem at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., during a two-day workshop focused on an idea known as panpsychism. The concept proposes that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of reality, like mass or electrical charge. The idea goes back to antiquity—Plato took it seriously—and has had some prominent supporters over the years, including psychologist William James and philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell. Lately it is seeing renewed interest, especially following the 2019 publication of philosopher Philip Goff’s book Galileo’s Error, which argues forcefully for the idea.
Hey and we are back … this is Max Flow and we will get to know more about the information limitations of psyche.
Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive, and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue. Every status update we read on social media, every tweet or text message we get from a friend, is competing for resources in our brains.
With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life. Our focus is short and erratic, our decision-making abilities go out the window and a list of unfinished projects begins to pile up.
Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on.
Posted in health, neuroscience, robotics/AI
Coverage of the risks and benefits of AI have paid scant attention to how chatbots might affect public health at a time when depression, suicide, anxiety, and mental illness are epidemic in the United States. But mental health experts and the healthcare industry view AI mostly as a promising tool, rather than a potential threat to mental health.
I am the CEO of Sagenext Infotech LLC. I lead the company’s sales, support, and technology front.
Many small businesses are benefiting from adopting cloud technology to their business operations. This technology is becoming more affordable and accessible, and it’s expected to grow into a trillion-dollar industry by 2028. To remain relevant, retain clients and improve growth, small businesses should fully adopt cloud technology.
Small-business cloud transformation involves the use of cloud technology to transition significant areas of a business in order to add benefits offered by the software or technology to the business.
People will laugh and dismiss it and make comparisons to googles clown glasses. But around 2030 Augmented Reality glasses will come out. Basically, it will be a pair of normal looking sunglasses w/ smart phone type features, Ai, AND… VR stuff.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday said the tech giant is putting artificial intelligence into digital assistants and smart glasses as it seeks to gain lost ground in the AI race.
Zuckerberg made his announcements at the Connect developers conference at Meta’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, the company’s main annual product event.
“Advances in AI allow us to create different (applications) and personas that help us accomplish different things,” Zuckerberg said as he kicked off the gathering.
Summary: Scientists made a novel discovery using zebrafish with a genetic mutation. These ‘deep-blind’ fish lack connections between the retina and brain yet retain functional brain circuits.
Remarkably, despite their inability to see, direct brain stimulation through optogenetics triggers normal visual behavior. This suggests that much of the zebrafish brain’s wiring is innate and doesn’t rely heavily on visual experience.
A new Boston Dynamics office in Frankfurt, Germany will provide sales, services, and field engineering support for European customers.
Hospital nurseries routinely place soft bands around the tiny wrists of newborns that hold important identifying information such as name, sex, mother, and birth date. Researchers at Rockefeller University are taking the same approach with newborn brain cells—but these neonates will keep their ID tags for life, so that scientists can track how they grow and mature, as a means for better understanding the brain’s aging process.
As described in a new paper in Cell, the new method developed by Rockefeller geneticist Junyue Cao and his colleagues is called TrackerSci (pronounced “sky”). This low-cost, high-throughput approach has already revealed that while newborn cells continue to be produced through life, the kinds of cells being produced greatly vary in different ages. This groundbreaking work, led by co-first authors Ziyu Lu and Melissa Zhang from Cao’s lab, promises to influence not only the study of the brain but also broader aspects of aging and disease across the human body.
“The cell is the basic functional unit of our body, so changes to the cell essentially underlie virtually every disease and the aging process,” says Cao, head of the Laboratory of Single-Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics. “If we can systematically characterize the different cells and their dynamics using this novel technique, we may get a panoramic view of the mechanisms of many diseases and the enigma of aging.”
Early-life stress (ELS) is one of the strongest lifetime risk factors for depression, anxiety, suicide, and other psychiatric disorders, particularly after facing additional stressful events later in life. Human and animal studies demonstrate that ELS sensitizes individuals to subsequent stress. However, the neurobiological basis of such stress sensitization remains largely unexplored. We hypothesized that ELS-induced stress sensitization would be detectable at the level of neuronal ensembles, such that cells activated by ELS would be more reactive to adult stress. To test this, we leveraged transgenic mice to genetically tag, track, and manipulate experience-activated neurons. We found that in both male and female mice, ELS-activated neurons within the nucleus accumbens (NAc), and to a lesser extent the medial prefrontal cortex, were preferentially reactivated by adult stress. To test whether reactivation of ELS-activated ensembles in the NAc contributes to stress hypersensitivity, we expressed hM4Dis receptor in control or ELS-activated neurons of pups and chemogenetically inhibited their activity during experience of adult stress. Inhibition of ELS-activated NAc neurons, but not control-tagged neurons, ameliorated social avoidance behavior following chronic social defeat stress in males. These data provide evidence that ELS-induced stress hypersensitivity is encoded at the level of corticolimbic neuronal ensembles.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Early-life stress enhances sensitivity to stress later in life, yet the mechanisms of such stress sensitization are largely unknown. Here, we show that neuronal ensembles in corticolimbic brain regions remain hypersensitive to stress across the life span, and quieting these ensembles during experience of adult stress rescues stress hypersensitivity.
