In this video, Unveiled takes a closer look at the concept of FREE WILL! Do humans have it? How can we prove it? And what if, actually, free will IS an illusion?? It’s one of the greatest questions in all of science and philosophy… but according to one theory, it just DOESN’T EXIST!
This is Unveiled, giving you incredible answers to extraordinary questions!
Depression is a difficult illness. Not only does it make you feel like crap, but like so many primarily mental illnesses, it also comes with a bucketful of misinformation and misconceptions surrounding it. Even medical specialists, whom you’d expect to be the authorities on the matter, are stumped by some aspects of the disease – the truth is, while humanity may be more informed than ever on matters of the brain, we still really don’t know what’s going on inside of it when it glitches like this.
But that may soon change. Researchers based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, claim to have developed what they call a “mood decoder” – a way of reading people’s emotional state just from looking at brain activity.
“This is the first demonstration of successful and consistent mood decoding of humans in these brain regions,” Baylor College neurosurgeon and project lead Sameer Sheth told MIT Technology Review. And the best part? The team have also found a way to stimulate a positive mood in patients’ brains.
Experts are warning that quantum computers could eventually overpower conventional encryption methods, a potentially dangerous fate for humanity that they’re evocatively dubbing the “quantum apocalypse,” the BBC reports.
Cracking today’s toughest encryption would take virtually forever today — but with the advent of quantum computers, they’re warning, the process could be cut down to mere seconds.
And that kind of number-crunching power could have disastrous consequences if it were to land in the wrong hands.
Anatomical decision-making by cellular collectives: Bioelectrical pattern memories, regeneration, and synthetic living organisms.
A key question for basic biology and regenerative medicine concerns the way in which evolution exploits physics toward adaptive form and function. While genomes specify the molecular hardware of cells, what algorithms enable cellular collectives to reliably build specific, complex, target morphologies? Our lab studies the way in which all cells, not just neurons, communicate as electrical networks that enable scaling of single-cell properties into collective intelligences that solve problems in anatomical feature space. By learning to read, interpret, and write bioelectrical information in vivo, we have identified some novel controls of growth and form that enable incredible plasticity and robustness in anatomical homeostasis. In this talk, I will describe the fundamental knowledge gaps with respect to anatomical plasticity and pattern control beyond emergence, and discuss our efforts to understand large-scale morphological control circuits. I will show examples in embryogenesis, regeneration, cancer, and synthetic living machines. I will also discuss the implications of this work for not only regenerative medicine, but also for fundamental understanding of the origin of bodyplans and the relationship between genomes and functional anatomy.
There are no instructions in our genes that code for the exact 3D structure of our bodies. There’s no tiny human contained in our DNA. So, what powers the transformation of the first cell in the embryo to a full-blown organism?
Dr Michael Levin is attacking this problem and, in the process of answering it, his lab is uncovering an entirely new way of looking at biology.
Summary: Findings support modern thought that neural networks store information by making short-term alterations to the synapses. The study sheds new light on short-term synaptic plasticity in recent memory storage.
Source: picower institute for learning and memory.
Between the time you read the Wi-Fi password off the café’s menu board and the time you can get back to your laptop to enter it, you have to hold it in mind. If you’ve ever wondered how your brain does that, you are asking a question about working memory that has researchers have strived for decades to explain. Now MIT neuroscientists have published a key new insight to explain how it works.