About 170 billion cells are in the brain, and as they go about their regular tasks, they produce waste — a lot of it.
The brain appears to rely on synchronized waves to wash out waste products, including toxins associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
Neurogenetic disorders, such as neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1), are diseases caused by a defect in one or more genes, which can sometimes result in cognitive and motor impairments. Better understanding the neural underpinning of these disorders and how they affect motor and cognitive abilities could contribute to the development of new treatment strategies.
Researchers at Stanford University and Washington University School of Medicine recently performed a study on mice aimed at investigating the impact of Nf1 gene mutations, which cause the NF1 neurogenetic disorder, on oligodendroglial plasticity, an adaptive brain process known to contribute to cognitive and motor functions.
Their findings, published in Nature Neuroscience, provide strong evidence that Nf1 mutations delay the development of oligodendroglia, a type of glial cells that support the functioning of the central nervous system, causing disruptions in motor learning.
This fleshy, pink smiling face is made from living human skin cells, and was created as part of an experiment to let robots show emotion.
How would such a living tissue surface, whatever its advantages and disadvantages, attach to the mechanical foundation of a robot’s limb or “face”?
In humans and…
Numerous electrophysiological experiments have reported that the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is involved in the process of working memory. PFC neurons continue firing to maintain stimulus information in the delay period without external stimuli in working memory tasks. Further findings indicate that while the activity of single neurons exhibits strong temporal and spatial dynamics (heterogeneity), the activity of population neurons can encode spatiotemporal information of stimuli stably and reliably. From the perspective of neural networks, the computational mechanism underlying this phenomenon is not well demonstrated. The main purpose of this paper is to adopt a new strategy to explore the neural computation mechanism of working memory. We used reinforcement learning to train a recurrent neural network model to learn a spatial working memory task.
This paper proposes a new four-dimensional chaotic system that consists of two active magnetically controlled memristors. The dynamic characteristics of the system, including equilibrium points, Lyapunov exponent spectrum, bifurcation diagram, double-parameter Lyapunov exponent, and attractor basin, are analyzed. The results indicate that the Lyapunov exponents of the system undergo abrupt changes. The bifurcation diagrams reveal the occurrence of sudden cusp bifurcations, and the diverse manifestations of two-parameter Lyapunov exponents under different parameter combinations further underscore the system’s complexity and variability. This chaotic system also possesses an infinite number of equilibrium points and coexisting attractors, demonstrating multiple stable states.
From the dynamical point of view, most cognitive phenomena are hierarchical, transient and sequential. Such cognitive spatio-temporal processes can be represented by a set of sequential metastable dynamical states together with their associatedions: The state is quasi-stationary close to one metastable state before a rapidion to another state. Hence, we postulate that metastable states are the central players in cognitive information processing. Based on the analogy of quasiparticles as elementary units in physics, we introduce here the quantum of cognitive information dynamics, which we term “cognon”. A cognon, or dynamical unit of thought, is represented by a robust finite chain of metastable neural states. Cognons can be organized at multiple hierarchical levels and coordinate complex cognitive information representations.
Theories of the electrophysiology of language comprehension are mostly informed by event-related potential effects observed between condition averages. We here argue that a dissociation between competing effect-level explanations of event-related potentials can be achieved by turning to predictions and analyses at the single-trial level. Specifically, we examine the single-trial dynamics in event-related potential data that exhibited a biphasic N400–P600 effect pattern. A group of multi-stream models can explain biphasic effects by positing that each individual trial should induce either an N400 increase or a P600 increase, but not both. An alternative, single-stream account, Retrieval-Integration theory, explicitly predicts that N400 amplitude and P600 amplitude should be correlated at the single-trial level.
This month in 1,871, James Clerk demonstrated entropy with a thought experiment now known as’s Demon.
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Disruptive innovations in technology, such as humanoid robots and electric vehicles, will lead to significant changes in labor, economy, and society, posing both opportunities and challenges for the future.
Questions to inspire discussion.
Continue reading “The Future of Technology: Impact on Labor, Economy, and Society” »
An immunotherapy drug given before surgery instead of chemotherapy meant that over ten times more patients with a certain genetic profile were cancer-free after surgery, according to clinical trial results presented by researchers at UCL and UCLH.
The findings, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting 2024, are interim results from the NEOPRISM-CRC phase II clinical trial assessing whether the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab can improve outcomes for patients with stage two or stage three MMR deficient/MSI-High bowel cancer. The trial was a collaboration among UCL, UCLH, the Christie NHS Foundation Trust in Manchester, St. James’s University Hospital in Leeds, University Hospital Southampton and the University of Glasgow.
Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK, with around 42,900 cases a year. Though still predominantly a cancer that affects older people, cases among the under 50s have been increasing in recent decades.
