Lifeboat Foundation

Differentiating consciousness from the concept of Mind2.

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Artificial intelligence is changing health care. It promises better diagnoses and fewer mistakes and all in less time. While some associate AI with a frightening dystopian future, many doctors see it as a source of support.

To help them care for patients, doctors are programming apps and supplying AI with data. At Berlin’s Charité hospital, Professor Surjo Soekadar is researching how neurotechnology might support paralysis patients in their everyday lives — for example, via assistance systems that are controlled via their thoughts.

Continue reading “Doctors, apps and artificial intelligence — The future of medicine” »

In September 2020 we sat down with Robert Sapolsky, Stanford professor and the author of Human Behavioral Biology lectures (https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA) to discuss if it’s possible for our society to reconcile our understanding of justice with scientific understanding of human behaviour.

Why do humans, most likely, have no free will? How does that link to depression and other psychiatric disorders? Can people accept the idea that there is no free will and start using, what science tells us about the reasons behind our behaviour, as a basis for making sense of justice and morality? If yes, can we even imagine what such society would look like?

Continue reading “Robert Sapolsky: Justice and morality in the absence of free will” »

Notably, when implanted into mouse brains, the printed cells showed both structural and functional integration with the host tissue.

“Our droplet printing technique provides a means to engineer living 3D tissues with desired architectures, which brings us closer to the creation of personalised implantation treatments for brain injury,” said Dr Linna Zhou, senior author of the study.

The researchers now aim to further evolve their technique and create complex multi-layered cerebral cortex tissues that can mimic the human brain’s architecture in a more realistic way. Beyond brain injuries, these 3D-printed cells could benefit drug evaluation and our knowledge on brain development and cognition.

According to a new theory presented by researchers at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus and their colleagues at University College London, how useful a memory is for future situations determines where it resides in the brain.

The theory offers a new way of understanding systems consolidation, a process that transfers certain memories from the hippocampus – where they are initially stored – to the neocortex — where they reside long term.

Under the classical view of systems consolidation, all memories move from the hippocampus to the neocortex over time. But this view doesn’t always hold up; research shows some memories permanently reside in the hippocampus and are never transferred to the neocortex.

Neuroscientists in New York have made a major breakthrough in memory research that promises to revolutionize our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

A new study details how a structural cell that wraps around blood vessels may actually play an important role in the formation and storage of long-term memories.

According to the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly 5.8 million American adults live with Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias. And yet, our understanding of these diseases is still fairly limited, largely thanks to question marks over how memories are actually formed.

That, in a nutshell, is The perceived sensation of pain that you know as heartburn, the smell that draws you to a steak on the grill, the sight of magenta streaked across the sky at sunset—all are instances of conscious experience.

A study from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago demonstrated that Botulinum toxin (Botox) injected in the pylorus during endoscopy improves chronic nausea and vomiting in children who have a disorder of gut-brain interaction (DGBI). These debilitating symptoms not attributed to a defined illness have previously been called functional gastrointestinal disorders before the newer DGBI classification. The study’s findings point to a novel understanding of the condition’s pathology – pylorus that is failing to relax and allow food to effectively pass into the small intestine resulting in symptoms of nausea, vomiting, early satiety and bloating.

Results were published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition.

“Our results suggest that chronic nausea and vomiting might be caused by pyloric dysfunction, rather than abnormal peristalsis, which is the rhythmic contraction and relaxation of digestive tract muscles needed to move foods and liquids through the gastrointestinal system,” said lead author Peter Osgood, MD, gastroenterologist at Lurie Children’s and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “This is a paradigm shift in our understanding of mechanistic pathology. Importantly, it opens the door to a more targeted use of Botox specifically in children who are found to have pyloric dysfunction during endoscopy, and for whom the current medications are not effective.”