#neuroscience
Cerveau et neurosciences : mythes et réalités - ALBERT MOUKHEIBER - Sismique
#politique #environnement #neuroscience #sociologie
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=lEivqlCJK34
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEivqlCJK34
"Researchers at REMspace, a California-based startup, have achieved a historic milestone, demonstrating that lucid dreams could unlock new dimensions of communication and humanity's potential. Using specially designed equipment, two individuals successfully induced lucid dreams and exchanged a simple message."
The press release continues:
"When the server detected that the first participant entered a lucid dream, it generated a random Remmyo word and sent it to him via earbuds. The participant repeated the word in his dream, with his response captured and stored on the server. Eight minutes later, the next participant entered a lucid dream. She received the stored message from the first participant and confirmed it upon awakening, marking the first-ever 'chat' exchanged in dreams."
Impractical, but fascinating.
Breakthrough from REMspace: First ever communication between people in dreams
Notre cerveau possède t-il un niveau quantique de fonctionnement ? - rtflash.fr | tregouet.org ⬅️ URL principale utilisée pour la prévisualisation Diaspora* et avec plus de garantie de disponibilité.
Archivez vous même la page s'il n'existe pas encore d'archive et évitez ainsi les pisteurs, puis ulilisez µBlockOrigin pour supprimer d'éventuelles bannières qui subsisteraient sur la page sauvegardée.
💾 archive.org
"Whenever I talk with people born with the internet, I'm surprised at how informed and expressive they are. I don't think the previous generations could have matched up at the same age. Historically, technology has been the enabler of cognition and we're finding more and more ways to design tools for thought to augment our brains."
"We find that cybermorphosis changes between generations. The same people who grew up with the internet now don't know what files are."
"Hierarchical file systems are great at managing documents but it might not actually be the best way to work with concepts."
"While Stephen Hawking in the early 2010s used the few muscles he could still control in a clever way to communicate, today's Neuralink enables Noland Arbaugh to pull Civ VI all-nighters."
"We know surprisingly little about how cognition works."
"I still remember when we received a grant to purchase the (very expensive) NIRSport2 for our lab which was the state-of-the-art fNIRS neuroimaging equipment at the time. About a week after we received it, the revolutionary Kernel Flow came out, shaking up the field completely."
fNIRS stands for "functional near-infrared spectroscopy" and is a near-infrared spectroscopy technique that estimates the concentration of hemoglobin from changes in absorption of near infrared light. Kernel Flow is a fNIRS and electroencephalogram (EEG) headcap for "fast whole-head hemodynamic imaging".
"We know surprisingly little about how cognition works."
"Cybermorph hardware comes in many forms:"
"Multi-channel invasive neural implants for direct neural interaction (such as Neuralink)",
"Redesigned keyboards with new types of mapping to improve WPM",
"Direct current stimulation to key areas of the brain using tDCS devices",
"AR and VR glasses designed to improve how we interact with our extended mind", and
"New external effectors such as bionic limbs and prosthetics."
tDCS stands for "transcranial direct current stimulation" and is a technique where scalp electrodes create electric currents that create electric fields inside the brain that, depending on the polarity electric fields, increase or decrease neuronal activity in that brain region.
At the end, she (Esben Kran) issues a list of predictions for cybermorph brain augmentation. I'll let you click through to get the predictions.
If artificial intelligence had started with emotional affect instead of vision (or language?), everything would have been different, says neuroscientist Mark Solms. Well, it is true that efforts to process vision go back to the earliest days of AI, and took a quantum leap forward with AlexNet winning the ImageNet competition using neural networks in 2012. But efforts to master language and beat the Turing Test also date back to the earliest days of AI. How could the AI field have started with emotional affect? By studying the reticular activating system of the brain? How could that have been done?
"Had we not started with vision, but rather had started with affect, the whole brouhaha would never have happened, because the problem with vision is that it is not an intrinsically conscious process. The famous knowledge argument of Frank Jackson, which I don't need to spell out,
"My simplified version of the knowledge argument is that there's this imaginary visual neuroscientist named Mary, and she knows that's the knowledge. She knows everything there is to know about the physics and physiology and anatomy and information science of vision." "But she's blind. So although Mary knows everything about the functional causal mechanisms of visual processing, she's never experienced what it is like to see. So now, one day, thanks be to God, the gift of sight is bestowed on Mary. And Jackson's point is, at that moment she learns something utterly new about vision, namely, what it's like to experience redness and greenness and contrast and light and dark and so on."
He comments on the AI field's pursuit of "cortical" processing:
"If the cortex were the seat of consciousness, then there's a very simple prediction, which is that if you remove the cortex, you should remove consciousness. You know what could be more straightforward than that in terms of popperian science? You're saying, okay, I have an hypothesis that the cortex is the seat of consciousness, and that here is a falsifiable prediction. The prediction is remove cortex. You should remove consciousness. Problem is, that doesn't happen if you remove cortex, as has been done thousands of times in neonatal mammals. The animal doesn't fall into a coma. In other words, it doesn't lose consciousness. It wakes up in the morning, goes to sleep at night. But much more important than that, it is emotionally responsive to its environment. So these these decorticate animals play.They fight. They flee, when in danger. They copulate. They raise their pups to maturity. You know, all of this and and of course, we're talking about animals. But the same applies to human beings, that there are children who are who are born with a condition called hydranencephaly, which basically means a cranium filled with cerebrospinal fluid instead of a cranium filled out with, with cortex. They have no cortex. And just like the neonate decorticate mammals, these neonate decorticate humans, they wake up in the morning, go to sleep at night, they have seizures, they lose consciousness. But much more importantly, they are emotionally responsive to their environments. You tickle them, they giggle. You give them something that they like, they are pleased. You take it away, they're annoyed. They arch their back. They protest, you give them a fright, they startle, etc. none of which is predicted by the theory that the cortex is the seat of consciousness."
"The standard theory is that consciousness can be divided into two aspects. The one is its contents or qualities. And that's what the cortex provides, and the other is its sort of level or, or quantities. And that's what the brainstem provides. That's the standard view. In other words, if you have only a brainstem and you do not have a cortex, you should have wakefulness, a kind of blank wakefulness. You should be in a condition that we recognize in neurology as the vegetative state, in other words, which is another name for the vegetative state, nonresponsive wakefulness. And that's what you predict on that theory. And yet these kids are not nonresponsive, if you will, give the double negative. They are responsive. They are emotionally responsive. So the theory is just, you know, the prediction arising, the most basic prediction arising from the theory that the cortex is the seat of consciousness, of its contents and its qualities is falsified."
"If you stimulate those brainstem structures that I'm talking about, the reticular activating system, and by the way, there's also another structure called the periaqueductal gray. If you stimulate these structures electrically, there's again a very straightforward prediction. If all that they do is volume control, you know, they just regulate the level of wakefulness." "Then if you stimulate them, you might see the patient becoming more alert or less alert or, you know, falling into a coma or moving into a into a highly vigilant and aroused state. But there shouldn't be any content or quality to that."
"What you see is intense affective states, depending on which part of the reticular activating system or periaqueductal gray you stimulate. You generate a wide variety of the most intense affective states, and you see nothing like that when stimulating cortex. If you stimulate cortex, you get barely any affective responses. If you do, it's kind of like memories of affects or thoughts about affects or abstractions about affects. You don't get the intense, actual raw feelings that you do. So that's weighty evidence that the electric electrical stimulation evidence is weighty support for the idea that affect is actually generated by these brainstem structures, because you were just arguing that the the reticular activating system and the periaqueductal gray is the the seat of arousal and therefore the seat of affect and the seat of consciousness."
Rethinking the Mind - Prof. Mark Solms - Machine Learning Street Talk
La nature quantique de l’état de conscience confirmée par une étude sur l’anesthésie ⬅️ URL principale utilisée pour la prévisualisation Diaspora* et avec plus de garantie de disponibilité.
Archivez vous même la page s'il n'existe pas encore d'archive et évitez ainsi les pisteurs, puis ulilisez µBlockOrigin pour supprimer d'éventuelles bannières qui subsisteraient sur la page sauvegardée.
💾 archive.org
#physiquequantique #consommation #étude #anesthésie #microtubules #neuroscience
"Psychedelics reopen the social reward learning critical period."
This came out last year but I only found out about it today.
"During specific periods of brain development, the nervous system exhibits heightened sensitivity to ethologically relevant stimuli, as well as increased malleability for synaptic, circuit and behavioural modifications."
"Ethologically relevant" means... relevant to how an animal relates to its natural environment?
"These mechanistically constrained windows of time are called critical periods and neuroscientists have long sought methods to reopen them for therapeutic benefit. Recently, we have discovered a novel critical period for social reward learning and shown that the empathogenic psychedelic MDMA is able to reopen this critical period. This mechanism shares a number of features with the therapeutic effects of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of PTSD, including rapid onset, durability and context dependence."
Ok, so this experiment is based on a technique called "social reward conditioned place preference" for mouse experiments.
"Mice were socially housed (3-5 males) in a cage containing corncob bedding until the pre-determined age for social reward conditioned place preference testing. Each mouse was used for only one behavioural time point. At the pre-determined age, mice were placed in an open field activity chamber equipped with infrared beams and a software interface to monitor the position of the mouse. The apparatus was partitioned into two equally sized zones using a clear Plexiglas wall, with a 5 cm diameter circular hole at the base; each zone contained one type of novel bedding. The amount of time spent freely exploring each zone was recorded during 30-min test sessions. For example, a score of 900 means that the mouse spent exactly 50% of its time on each of the two beddings, whereas a score of 1,800 means that it spent the full 30 min in the bedding that would be subsequently assigned as the social conditioning cue, and no time in the bedding that would be assigned as the isolation conditioning cue. After an initial pre-conditioning trial to establish baseline preference for the two sets of bedding cues, mice were assigned to receive social conditioning (with cage mates) for 24 h on one type of bedding, followed by 24 h of isolation conditioning (without cage mates) on the other bedding cue. To assure unbiased design, chamber assignments were counterbalanced for side and bedding cues. Immediately after the isolation conditioning, a 30-min post-conditioning trial was conducted to establish preference for the two conditioned cues. Conditioned place preference is a learned association between a condition (for example, social) and a cue (bedding). It does not require scent from the other mice, as the bedding itself serves as the cue."
Got that? I'm going to deliberately avoid quoting more from the paper because they use a lot of, um, chemical names that these online information distribution systems such as the one you're using right now disapprove of. (I'm going to let "MDMA" slip though and see if I get away with it.)
Basically the research shows MDMA reinstates social reward learning in a serotonin receptor 2A-independent manner.
"To directly compare treatment-related transcriptional changes specific to the shared ability of psychedelics to reopen the social reward learning critical period, we analysed the gene expression dataset between conditions in which the critical period is in the open state versus conditions where the critical period remains in or returns to the closed state. Using this approach, we identified 65 genes that were significantly differentially expressed. Gene set enrichment analysis of this list identified significant enrichment of ontologies associated with endothelial development, regulation of angiogenesis, vascular development and tissue morphogenesis. Of note, many of the top scoring genes are components of the extracellular matrix or have been implicated in its remodelling, including: Fn1, Mmp16, Trpv4, Tinagl1, Nostrin41, Cxcr4, Adgre5, Robo4 and Sema3g45."
I didn't Google all those genes to see what is known about their function but you're welcome to. I wish I had more time to study the brain, but there is so much to learn and I don't have more time to devote to it right now.
"Additionally, the differentially expressed gene set includes the immediate early genes Fos, Junb, Arc and Dusp. When we did not control for the psychedelic-specific psychoactive response, we identified 39 differentially expressed genes; however, enrichment analysis identified no significant ontologies associated with this gene set, and only 6 genes (Hspa12b, Sema3g, Eng, Flt4, Cavin1, and Ube4b) overlapped with the differentially expressed genes in the open state versus closed state dataset. These results provide evidence that the shared ability of psychedelics to reopen the social reward learning critical period converges at transcriptional regulation of the extracellular matrix. On the basis of these findings, our working model posits that psychedelics act at a diverse array of binding targets (such as sodium-dependent serotonin transporter (SERT), serotonin receptor 2A (5-HT2AR), N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDA), and kappa-opioid receptor (KOR)), to trigger a downstream signalling response that leads to activity-dependent (perhaps via immediate early genes-mediated coincidence detection) degradation of the extracellular matrix, which in turn is the permissive event that enables metaplasticity. In this model, transcriptional upregulation of extracellular matrix components (for example, Fibronectin (FN1)) and downregulation of extracellular matrix proteolytic enzymes (for example, Matrix Metalloproteinase 16 (MMP-16)), reflects the homeostatic response to these long-lasting cellular changes."
There's a lot more technical work in the paper. But basically, the researchers were able to find evidence of reopening of social learning with the "social reward conditioned place preference" technique, identify brain receptors and even an assortment of genes involved. This is all in mice. Implications for humans not yet known.
#discoveries #neuroscience #psychedelics #criticalperiod #mdma
Making neural networks out of ... neurons? A company called FinalSpark claims to do computations with actual brain "neurospheres," "round structures made of thousands of living neurons."
https://zeroes.ca/@hannu_ikonen/112554774322012925 hannu_ikonen@zeroes.ca - Friendly #Fediverse advice: if you like your brain, stay the fuck away from glyphosate.
https://www.sokolovelaw.com/blog/foods-glyphosate-cancer/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9101768/
Thanks in advance.
What happens in the gut happens in the brain.
#nutrition #neuroscience #microglia https://traffic.megaphone.fm/HYMANDIGITALLLC7654978750.mp3?updated=1716391914
Person with paralysis of arms and legs uses Neuralink to play chess.
Anschaulich erläutert Lisa Feldman Barrett in ihrem Buch die Konzepte aktueller Emotionsforschung. Man erfährt dabei durchaus auch einiges über sich selbst. Eine Rezension
Dieses verständlich geschriebene Buch vermittelt Wissen zu Gefühlen und dazu, wie wir sie wahrnehmen und interpretieren. Eine Rezension (Rezension zu Wie Gefühle entstehen von Lisa Feldman Barrett)#Gefühle #Psychologie #Neurowissenschaften #Emotionen #Menschenverstand #Affekt #Verhaltensbiologie #Verhaltensforschung #Neuroscience #Verstand #Gehirn #Hirnforschung #Sozialpsychologie #Disziplin #Wut #Liebe #Angst #Scham #PsychologieHirnforschung #Biologie
»Wie Gefühle entstehen«: Fühlen, wie das Gehirn es will
"I know what the sound of a laugh is, but I can't hear it in my mind. I have no memories with sounds."
"Jessie only discovered that this was unusual when, by chance, she met a researcher who studies people like her."
The term "anauralia" has been coined for the auditory analogue to aphantasia -- the inability to picture images in one's "mind's eye".
Who’s afraid of a female brain? Reality-denying feminists do women no favours
Why Does #Music Give You Chills? The #Neuroscience of #Sound
Some have had moments (some have not) when a favorite song comes on in the car, at a concert, or even while sitting at home, and seemingly out of #nowhere – #goosebumps, a tingling sensation, or a shiver (frission). #Why does this happen?
(4:24)