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#brain

nowisthetime@pod.automat.click
nowisthetime

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Summary:

#Biotechnology, #nanotechnology, bionanorobotics, Artificial Intelligence #AI #biotech interface, #brain #computer interface, bioengineering of artificial life is so far advanced, that most people have difficulty comprehending the magnitude of the developments happening. However, we must learn to survive. I recently saw a post in a prominent physician group that my research is “Quackery. “

These poor doctors have no idea #how far behind the current #knowledge they are and how much we all need to study to understand the threats that we are facing as #humanity. If all you read is JAMA and NEJM you will be lost in the conversation about these biotechnological advances, the threat they pose and the discovery of solutions. I am not personally offended by these attacks but saddened when the hope of supposed freedom doctors remain so closed minded.

It does not give me much hope that #people will awaken to this before it is too late, which it possibly already could be #now, given the worsening findings in human #blood around the #world. We cannot see n#anobots in brain tissue - how do you know that a parallel AI processing platform has not already been installed in the C19 injected? I believe it has.

The global biotechnology market was valued at USD 1.55 trillion in 2023 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.96% from 2024 to 2030.

You cannot wish this away. The fusion of AI with humanity is here.

It is happening silently, just as Klaus Schwab has said. If you want to even start to fight for the survival of the human species, and our #soul and #spirit, you must learn about the weapons that the enemy is using.
https://podbay.fm/p/the-cosmic-salon/e/1712779919

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gander22h@diasp.org
Adam Hunt

The Theory That Consciousness Is a Quantum System Gains Support

Musser explains the basic idea of the Orch Or Theory (OOT), that conscious experience arises from quantum phenomena in the brain. The theory gained little traction in the past because it was difficult to test but Musser thinks that the use of anesthetics on brain organoids (lumps of brain tissue grown in a medium), along with other new methods may enable the theory to be tested

...
Musser tells us, recent research suggests that some kind of quantum processing does occur in the brain. One suggested example is the way a bird’s internal compass includes radicals with an “odd, unpaired electron”:

When these radicals eventually react, the outcome will depend on the strength and orientation of the magnetic field. The thinking is that the bird is sensitive to this in a way that allows it to tell north from south. The process is highly quantum as the radical pair electrons are entangled, which means that they act as a single quantum object, even though they are some distance apart.
— Musser, ”Radical consciousness theory?”

If that’s correct, we already know of at least one quantum process in a nervous system. Linking that up to human consciousness is still a stretch but, he says, scientists are more willing now to at least consider it.

Feel free to jump in and refute!!

#quantum #quanta #brain

The Theory That Consciousness Is a Quantum System Gains Support

How a quantum theory of consciousness will work out is anyone’s guess but here’s a prediction: It won’t help the cause of materialism much.

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anonymiss@despora.de
anonymiss

A giant crawling #brain: the jaw-dropping world of #termites

source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/18/a-giant-crawling-brain-the-jaw-dropping-world-of-termites

Back in the 1930s, the other Marais didn’t write a #termite #science book, but a book about how humans could understand termites – as a #bug, a #body, a #soul, a force on the #landscape. Looking at termites this way changed how I see the #world, science, the #future and myself.

#nature #environment #knowledge #understanding

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anonymiss@despora.de
anonymiss

The #Number #Five Is Nothing Like the Number #Four

Our #brains #process them in completely different ways.

source: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/12/processing-numbers-four-five-biology/676380/?gift=bt1n2vDjnfxxzkH_t7B8m4IBC69GwvvR7NuTR_ScRwg

More than 150 years ago, the economist and philosopher William Stanley Jevons discovered something curious about the number four. While musing about how the mind conceives of numbers, he tossed a handful of black beans into a cardboard box. Then, after a fleeting glance, he guessed how many there were, before counting them to record the true value. After more than 1,000 trials, he saw a clear pattern. When there were four or fewer beans in the box, he always guessed the right number. But for five beans or more, his quick estimates were often incorrect.

Jevons’s description of his self-experiment, published in Nature in 1871, set the “foundation of how we think about numbers,” Steven Piantadosi, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at UC Berkeley, says. It sparked a long-lasting and ongoing debate about why there seems to be a limit on the number of items we can accurately judge to be present in a set.

Now a new study in Nature Human Behaviour has edged closer to an answer by taking an unprecedented look at how human brain cells fire when presented with certain quantities. Its findings suggest that the brain uses a combination of two mechanisms to judge how many objects it sees. One estimates quantities. The second sharpens the accuracy of those estimates—but only for small numbers.

It’s “very exciting” that the findings connect long-contested ideas to their neural underpinnings, Piantadosi, who was not involved in the study, says. “There’s not many things in cognition where people have been able to pinpoint very plausible biological foundations.” Although the new study does not end the debate, the findings start to untangle the biological basis for how the brain judges quantities, which could inform bigger questions about memory, attention, and even mathematics.

The ability to instantly judge the number of items in a set doesn’t have anything to do with counting. Human infants have this number sense even before they learn language. And it’s not limited to humans: Monkeys, bees, fish, crows, and other animals also have it. A monkey needs to be able to quickly judge the number of apples in a tree, and also how many other monkeys it’s competing against for those apples. A lion, when confronted by other lions, has to decide whether to fight or flee. Honeybees need to know which area has the most flowers for foraging. A guppy has better chances of escaping a predator if it joins a shoal. “The bigger the shoal, the safer that little fish is,” Brian Butterworth, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved in the new work, says.

This innate number sense is therefore crucial to survival, increasing an animal’s chances of finding food, avoiding predators, and ultimately reproducing. “It simply pays off for the survival of an animal to be able to differentiate numeric quantities,” says Andreas Nieder, a professor of animal physiology at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, who co-led the new study. The fact that this ability is found in diverse animals, from insects to humans, suggests that it arose a long time ago, and its neural basis has interested cognitive scientists for decades.

In 2002, when Nieder was working with the neuroscientist Earl Miller at MIT as a postdoctoral fellow, they published one of the first pieces of evidence that numbers are linked to specific neurons. In a behavioral experiment using monkeys, they found that these neurons, which are located in the prefrontal cortex, where higher-level processing takes place, have preferred numbers—favorite numbers that, when perceived, make the cells light up in brain scans.

For example, some neurons are tuned to the number three. When they’re presented with three objects, they fire more. Other neurons are tuned to the number five and fire when presented with five objects, and so on. These neurons aren’t exclusively committed to their favorites: They also fire for numbers adjacent to them. (So the neuron tuned to five also fires for four and six objects.) But they don’t do it as often, and as the presented number gets further away from the preferred number, the neurons’ firing rate decreases.

Nieder was excited by the deeper questions the work presented about the development of mathematical ability. Numbers lead to counting, and then to symbolic number representations, such as Arabic numerals that stand in for quantities. Those symbolic numbers underpin arithmetic and mathematics. “For us to know how numbers are represented [in the brain] is setting the foundation for everything that’s coming later,” Nieder says.

He went on to learn as much as he could about number neurons. In 2012, his team discovered that the neurons respond to their preferred numbers when they’re estimating the quantity of a set of sounds or visual items. Then, in 2015, they showed that crows also have number neurons. In a show of “amazing crow behavior,” Nieder says, the birds could correctly peck the number of dots or Arabic numerals displayed to them.

However, no one had identified number neurons in humans. That’s because studying the human brain is notoriously difficult: Scientists usually can’t access its activity ethically in experiments while people are alive. Brain-imaging tools don’t have the resolution needed to distinguish individual neurons, and scientific curiosity alone can’t justify implanting invasive electrodes in the brain.

To peer into a living brain, Nieder needed to find patients who already had electrode implants and who would consent to being part of his research. In 2015, he contacted Florian Mormann—the head of the cognitive and clinical neurophysiology group at the University of Bonn, who is one of the few clinicians in Germany who does single-cell recordings in human patients—to see if he and his patients would join Nieder’s search for human number neurons. Mormann said yes, and their teams got to work examining the brain activity of his epilepsy patients, who had previously had electrodes implanted to improve their medical care.

Nine patients did simple calculations in their heads while researchers recorded their brain activity. Sure enough, in the data, Nieder and Mormann saw neurons firing for their preferred numbers—the first time number neurons had been identified in the human brain. They published their findings in Neuron in 2018.

Neuroscientists are of course driven to understand the mind, Nieder says, so “finding such neurons in the human brain is extremely rewarding.” To continue their quest, Nieder and Mormann launched a new study to find out how the neurons represent odd and even numbers. The researchers recruited 17 epilepsy patients and showed them flashes of dots, ranging in number from one to nine, on computer screens. The participants indicated whether they saw an odd or even number while electrodes recorded their brain activity.

Over the next few months, as Esther Kutter, a graduate student studying with Nieder, analyzed the resulting data, she saw a clear pattern emerge—right around the number four. The data, which comprised 801 recordings of single neurons firing, showed two distinct neural signatures: one for small numbers and one for large. Above the number four, the neurons’ firing for their preferred number grew progressively less precise, and they erroneously fired for numbers close to the preferred one. But for four and below, the neurons fired precisely—with the same small amount of error whether firing for one, two, three, or four objects. The misfiring in response to other numbers was largely absent.

This surprised Nieder. He hadn’t previously seen this boundary in his animal studies: Those experiments had included numbers only up to five. He hadn’t set out to probe Jevons’s observation, nor did he expect to see a neural boundary confirm what behavioral studies had found. Up until that point, he had been convinced that the brain had just one mechanism for judging numbers—a continuum that got fuzzier the higher the numbers climbed.

The new data changed that for him. “This boundary popped out in different ways,” Nieder says. The neural patterns suggested that there is an additional mechanism that suppresses smaller-number neurons from firing for the wrong numbers. Piantadosi and Serge Dumoulin, the director of the Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, in Amsterdam, had both previously published papers supporting the idea that only one mechanism manages the neuronal interpretation of numbers. Yet they were struck by Nieder and Mormann’s new data showing that there are, in fact, two separate mechanisms.

It’s “real validation that large and small numbers have different neural signatures,” Piantadosi says. But he cautioned that two signatures can emerge from a single process; whether it should be described as one mechanism or two is still up for debate. “This is just beautiful,” Dumoulin says. “This type of data wasn’t available, and certainly not in humans.”

However, one more major uncertainty remains. The researchers didn’t study the prefrontal or parietal cortices, where the majority of number neurons are located in monkeys. Instead, because of where the patients’ electrodes were inserted, the study focused on the medial temporal lobe, which is involved in memory. It isn’t the first place in the human brain you’d investigate to understand numbers, Nieder says. “On the other hand, the medial temporal lobe is also not the worst place to look for such neurons.”

That’s because the medial temporal lobe is linked to number sense. It’s active when children learn calculations and multiplication tables, and it’s intimately connected to regions where number neurons are thought to lie, Nieder says. It’s not clear why number neurons are present in this region, Butterworth says. “The things that we thought were specific to the parietal lobe seem to be reflected also in parts of the medial temporal lobe.”

One possibility is that these aren’t number neurons at all. Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, an assistant professor of neurology at UC San Francisco, thinks these could instead be concept neurons, which are located in the medial temporal lobe and are each linked to specific concepts. For example, one famous study found a concept neuron that responded directly and specifically to images of the actor Jennifer Aniston. “Maybe they are not finding the mechanisms of the number sense … Maybe they’re finding concept cells that are also applied to numbers,” Pinheiro-Chagas says. “As you have the concept of Jennifer Aniston, you could have the concept of three.”

The level of analysis is “just really outstanding,” says Marinella Cappelletti, a cognitive neuroscientist at Goldsmiths, University of London. The researchers provide “compelling evidence” for dual mechanisms in the medial temporal lobe. She thinks it would be valuable, however, to see whether these mechanisms operate in other brain regions as well, if the opportunity presents itself. “I see these findings as looking into a window,” Cappelletti says. “It would be nice to open it up a bit more and tell us more about the rest of the brain.”

The new findings have clear parallels to the limitations of working memory. People can hold only a certain number of objects in their awareness, or working memory, at one time. Experiments show that number is also four. The agreement between the boundary of number sense and that of working memory is “hard to ignore,” Cappelletti says.

The mechanisms may be related. In previous studies of number sense, when a participant stopped paying attention, they lost their ability to precisely judge the true value of numbers four and below. That suggests that the small-number system, which suppresses adjacent misfirings with small numbers, might be intimately tied to attention. Nieder now hypothesizes that the small-number system turns on only when you’re paying attention to what’s in front of you. He’s hoping to test this idea in monkeys, in addition to looking for a neural boundary at four that their experiments haven’t yet captured.

The latest research “seems to be the beginning of a new leap” in our understanding of number perception, Pinheiro-Chagas says, which could have useful applications. He hopes it will be fodder for discussions in math education and even artificial intelligence, which struggles with numerosity perception. Large language models are “pretty bad at counting,” he says. “They are pretty bad at understanding quantities.”

Better characterizing number neurons can also help us understand who we are. Next to the language system, number representation is humans’ second-biggest symbol system. People use numbers frequently and in a variety of ways, and we and our ancestors have used math to describe the world for millennia. In that sense, math is a fundamental part of being human. And, as this study starts to show, this calculation prowess might all stem from a finely tuned network of neurons in the #brain.

#science #mathematics #education #news #numbers

Gift Article: The Number Five Is Nothing Like the Number Four

Our brains process them in completely different ways.

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ramnath@nerdpol.ch
ramnath

The Simpsons Predictions
#pa #Quote Posted by amor (here)
Re Example 3 by Matthew: The Translator of Baby Speech (should be Thoughts of Baby).

This episode of the Simpson's gives me an opportunity to say that this is a forecast of the fact that they have engineered your computer monitor and your Television Monitor TO READ YOUR THOUGHTS. I have actually had this happen to me twice where I instantly understood what was happening and had a speech exchange with the man on the other side of the screen.

Now as to your computer, It has been engineered TO READ YOUR THOUGHTS, WHICH UNDOUBTEDLY ARE STORED AT THE NSA, ETC. In the meanwhile, it speeds up finding what you are looking for in their SEARCH section, as it shows up even before you can type it in. Further, I have found dense pages of print passing my eyes when I am in the bathroom facing the white floor tiles. This brings up the distinct possibility that they are PROGRAMMING YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS. A good way to produce HUMAN COMPLIANT ZONBIES!

The print is passing my eyes so quickly that it is not possible to read it or even identify individual words as spaces between words seem to have been omitted (I suspect as an energy saving device).

Many decades ago, while reading a Popular Mechanics Magazine, I read a small paragraph reference as to the fact that experiments were being done towards thought reading and having it register on a computer screen, first as words, then as pictures. I realized this would allow them to do all they are doing today, reading the thoughts of ALL ANIMAL LIFE as well as programming the subconscious minds of humans, and collecting and storing their thoughts. NO! I AM NOT CRAZY, JUST OBSERVANT, KNOW WHAT IS POSSIBLE AND AM VIGILANT.
I've have had similar experiences.

Hackers could get inside your BRAIN: Experts warn of growing threat from monitoring and controlling neural signals

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"About 1.5 weeks ago I was sitting on my stationary exercise bike and pondered that the seat was rather narrow. Within the hour I was on the #internet and got hit with advertisements for bicycle seat covers that I never searched for. If they're #reading my #thoughts and sending that #information somewhere then where's the receiver? Is it local, cell tower, satellite or do I have #brain implant(s)? "