Lifeboat Foundation

Smartphones and other tech pose special challenges — and opportunities — for young brains.

Scientists have used advanced imaging techniques to identify brain activity and regions linked to cognitive motor dissociation (CMD), or ‘hidden consciousness’. CMD is a state in which a person appears comatose and unresponsive while inwardly showing signs of conscious brain activity.

The findings, reported by a team from Columbia University in the US, may help doctors more easily identify CMD in the future, and better tailor treatments for people who can understand what’s being said to them but can’t respond to it.

CMD happens in around 15–25 percent of people with brain injuries from head trauma, brain hemorrhage, or cardiac arrest. In these patients, something breaks between the instructions coming from the brain and the muscles needed to carry those instructions out.

The largest ever study of the genetics of the brain – encompassing some 36,000 brain scans – has identified more than 4,000 genetic variants linked to brain structure. The results of the study, led by researchers at the University of Cambridge, are published in Nature Genetics today.

A fundamental goal in the field of sensory neuroscience is to understand the complex mechanisms that underlie the neural code responsible for processing natural visual scenes. In neuroscience, a fundamental yet unresolved question is how neural circuits are developed in natural settings by the interaction of multiple cell types. The eyes have evolved to communicate information about natural visual scenes using a wide range of interneurons, which is crucial for transmitting visual information to the brain.

Retina’s functioning is largely based on research into how it reacts to artificial stimuli like flashing lights and noise. These might not accurately represent how the retina interprets actual visual data. The complexity of how these more than 50 different types of interneurons contribute to retinal processing has yet to be fully understood despite the fact that different computations have been detected using such methods. In a recent research paper, a group of researchers has made a significant advancement by showing that a three-layer network model is capable of predicting retinal responses to natural sceneries with amazing precision, almost exceeding the bounds of experimental data. The researchers wanted to understand how the brain processes natural visual scenes, so they focussed on the retina, which is part of the eye that sends signals to the brain.

This model’s interpretability, i.e., the ability to comprehend and examine its internal organization, is one of its key characteristics. There is a strong correlation between the responses of interneurons that were directly included in the model and those that were separately recorded. This suggests that the model captures significant aspects of the retinal interneuron activity. It successfully reproduces a wide range of motion analysis, adaptability, and predictive coding phenomena when they are just trained on natural scenes. On the other hand, models trained on white noise cannot reproduce the same set of events, supporting the idea that examining natural sceneries is necessary to comprehend natural visual processing.

In the ’80s, the spy agency investigated the “Gateway Experience” technique to alter consciousness and ultimately escape spacetime. Here is everything you need to know.

She turned to me the other morning and said, “You heard of The Gateway?” It didn’t register in the moment. She continued, “It’s blowing up on TikTok.” Later on, she elaborated: It was not in fact the ill-fated ’90s computer hardware company folks were freaking out about. No, they’ve gone further back in time, to find a true treasure of functional media.

The intrigue revolves around a classified 1983 CIA report on a technique called the Gateway Experience, which is a training system designed to focus brainwave output to alter consciousness and ultimately escape the restrictions of time and space. The CIA was interested in all sorts of psychic research at the time, including the theory and applications of remote viewing, which is when someone views real events with only the power of their mind. The documents have since been declassified and are available to view.

Continue reading “How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA” »

An ancient relative of modern seals—known as Potamotherium valletoni—that had an otter-like appearance and lived over 23 million years ago likely used its whiskers to forage for food and explore underwater environments, according to a new study in Communications Biology. The findings provide further insight into how ancient seals transitioned from life on land to life underwater.

Although modern seals live in marine environments and use their whiskers to locate food by sensing vibrations in the water, ancient seal relatives mostly lived on land or in freshwater environments. Some species used their forelimbs to explore their surroundings. Prior to this study, it was unclear when seals and their relatives began using their whiskers to forage.

Alexandra van der Geer and colleagues investigated the evolution of whisker-foraging behaviors in seals by comparing the brain structures of Potamotherium with those of six extinct and 31 living meat-eating mammals, including mustelids, bears, and seal relatives. Brain structures were inferred from casts taken from the inside of skulls.

A presentation on the conception of the present moment in physics and cognitive neuroscience (presented at the 3rd European Summer School in Process Thought in Düsseldorf, Germany, 25–29 September 2014).

A recent study used special eye-tracking technology to investigate how people look at each other’s eyes and faces during conversations. The researchers, who published their results in Scientific Reports, found that people who exhibited more direct eye-to-eye contact during their conversation tended to also be better at following the direction of another’s gaze (they were better at understanding where the other person was looking). The research provides unique insights into non-verbal communication.

Much of human social communication occurs nonverbally, and eye contact plays a crucial role in allowing individuals to convey and interpret information such as attention, mental states, intentions, and emotions. Eye contact is not only passively received but also reciprocated through mutual looks.

The researchers wanted to examine the frequency and types of mutual looking behaviors, such as direct eye-to-eye contact and other gaze interactions involving different parts of the face. They were also interested in understanding how the mutual looking behaviors observed during interactions might influence subsequent gaze-following behavior.

Franzova and Shen et al. report that unresponsive patients with cognitive motor dissociation have intact ascending arousal pathways, preserved thalamocortical f.