Sam Harris is an American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, and podcast host.
His work touches on a wide range of topics, including rationality, religion, ethics, free will, neuroscience, meditation, philosophy of mind, politics, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.
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A new research at the intersection of cosmology and neurobiology implies that diverse physical processes lead to similar levels of complexity and self-organization present in structures of scales.
An astrophysicist at the University of Bologna and a neurosurgeon at the University of Verona compared the network of neuronal cells in the human brain with the cosmic network of galaxies and found astounding similarities.
In their paper ‘The quantitative comparison between the neuronal network and the cosmic web’ published in Frontiers in Physics, Franco Vazza, astrophysicist at the University of Bologna, and Alberto Feletti, neurosurgeon at the University of Verona, investigated the similarities between two of the most complex systems in existence: the cosmic web of galactic superclusters and the network of neuronal cells in the human brain.
Cancer remains one of the leading causes of death in the US at over 600,000 deaths per year. Cancers that form solid tumors such as in the breast, brain, or skin are particularly hard to treat. Surgery is typically the first line of defense for patients fighting solid tumors. But surgery may not remove all cancerous cells, and leftover cells can mutate and spread throughout the body. A more targeted and wholistic treatment could replace the blunt approach of surgery with one that eliminates cancer from the inside using our own cells.
Dennis Discher, Robert D. Bent Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and postdoctoral fellow Larry Dooling provide a new approach in targeted therapies for solid tumor cancers in their study, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Their therapy not only eliminates cancerous cells, but teaches the immune system to recognize and kill them in the future.
Scientists recently used electrical stimulation in the brains of epilepsy patients to investigate the relationship between brain activity and memory consolidation during sleep. They found that synchronizing the firing of neurons in the medial temporal lobe and neocortex through this stimulation improved memory consolidation, particularly for recognition memory tasks.
The findings, which have been published in Nature Neuroscience, contribute to our understanding of memory processes and may have important implications for the development of interventions for memory disorders and dementia.
The motivation behind this study was to investigate how the brain consolidates memories during sleep. While it is known that sleep plays a vital role in memory strengthening, the specific processes that occur in the brain during sleep are still not well understood.
Review discusses the increasing importance of two-dimensional nanomaterials like graphene in neuroscience, highlighting their potential in nerve repair, creating brain-mimicking synaptic devices, and treating neurological disorders. It also considers the challenges and future prospects of these materials in this complex field.
We know this, Kushner says, because issues with alcohol can start before people develop anxiety or depression. His research also suggests that having either a dependence on alcohol or an anxiety condition substantially increases the probability of developing the other condition within several years.
For Kushner, this two-way relationship suggests alcohol use disorder and anxiety and depression might share a root cause.
Kushner’s team’s latest research brings us one step closer to figuring out why these conditions are so closely linked: Their study suggests people with a diagnosis of anxiety or depression are more likely to experience alcohol use disorder symptoms than people without these conditions, even when they drink the same amount of alcohol. The results are published in the journal Alcohol: Clinical & Experimental Research.
Anosognosia is a condition in which a patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. Visual anosognosia, also called Anton syndrome, is associated with complete cortical blindness and unawareness of vision loss.
Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, sought to identify brain network connections associated with anosognosia. The investigators analyzed the connectivity patterns of 267 lesion locations associated with either vision loss (with and without awareness) or weakness (with and without awareness).
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Henry Molaison, known for years as “H.M.,” was famously unable to form new memories. If someone he had met left the room only to return several minutes later, he would greet that person again as if for the first time. Because of surgery to treat intractable epilepsy, H M. lacked a sea-horse-shaped brain structure called the hippocampus and had amnesia. His case helped establish the hippocampus as an engine of memory.
In recent years scientists have discovered another essential deficit that burdens people with hippocampal amnesia: they can’t envision the range of possibilities that must be considered to make future plans. When researchers asked a group of people with hippocampal damage to… More.
The ability to conjure up possible futures or alternative realities is the flip side of memory. Both faculties cohabit in the brain region called the hippocampus.
When interacting with another person, you likely spend part of your time trying to anticipate how they will feel about what you’re saying or doing. This task requires a cognitive skill called theory of mind, which helps us to infer other people’s beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.
MIT neuroscientists have now designed a computational model that can predict other people’s emotions—including joy, gratitude, confusion, regret, and embarrassment—approximating human observers’ social intelligence. The model was designed to predict the emotions of people involved in a situation based on the prisoner’s dilemma, a classic game theory scenario in which two people must decide whether to cooperate with their partner or betray them.
To build the model, the researchers incorporated several factors that have been hypothesized to influence people’s emotional reactions, including that person’s desires, their expectations in a particular situation, and whether anyone was watching their actions.
