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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 51

Sep 10, 2024

What Happens Inside the Brain When Patients Are Put Under Anesthetic?

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Researchers mapped changes in the brain’s architecture before, during and after propofol sedation, guided by functional magnetic resonance imaging, enabling them to monitor blood flow to areas of the brain during the (un)conscious state.

Sep 10, 2024

Analog biological backpropagation: A new conjecture “Self Aware Networks” explains how derivatives & loss functions are represented in the brain

Posted by in categories: biological, computing, neuroscience

Also discussed is a comparison between analog computing and digital in the context of computational biology. In this video I am reading a recent discussion of my notes with Self Aware Networks.

Sep 9, 2024

How the brain’s inner chamber governs our state of consciousness

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

In hospital operating rooms and intensive care units, propofol is a drug of choice, widely used to sedate patients for their comfort or render them fully unconscious for invasive…


Propofol works quickly and is tolerated well by most patients when administered by an anesthesiologist.

But what’s happening inside the brain when patients are put under and what does this reveal about consciousness itself?

Continue reading “How the brain’s inner chamber governs our state of consciousness” »

Sep 9, 2024

How context-specific factors control gene activity

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

Every cell in our body contains the same DNA, yet liver cells are different from brain cells, and skin cells differ from muscle cells. What determines these differences? It all comes down to gene regulation; essentially how and when genes are turned on and off to meet the cell’s demands. But gene regulation is quite complex, especially because it is itself regulated by other parts of DNA.

Sep 9, 2024

Alzheimer’s drug may save lives through ‘suspended animation’

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, engineering, neuroscience

Could buy patients more time to survive critical injuries and diseases, even when disaster strikes far from a hospital.

Donepezil, an FDA-approved drug to treat Alzheimer’s, has the potential to be repurposed for use in emergency situations to prevent irreversible organ injury, according to researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

Using donepezil (DPN), researchers report that they were able to put tadpoles of Xenopus laevis frogs into a hibernation-like torpor.

Sep 8, 2024

Why Your Brain Isn’t the Creator, But the Consumer

Posted by in category: neuroscience

(video 19min) What if everything you know about consciousness is wrong?


What if everything you know about consciousness is wrong? This video challenges the long-standing belief that the brain creates consciousness, revealing a bold new theory: the brain is not the creator but the *consumer*—a filter limiting your access to an infinite, boundless consciousness that exists beyond it. We’ll explore David Chalmers’ \.

Sep 8, 2024

Panpsychism and Alfred North Whitehead

Posted by in categories: futurism, neuroscience

The wave dimension is crucial. Without the time-binding wave of consciousness established by actual entities remembering their past instant(s), experiencing, choosing, and acting in their present instants, and anticipating and then passing their inheritance on to their future instant(s), it would not be possible to begin a sentence and then go on to complete it in a way that has meaning. It would not be possible to interact with ourselves or other people in a way that has meaning. We couldn’t begin, continue, and complete a meal. We would forget where we were and what we were doing. We couldn’t begin, continue, and complete a walk. We would forget where we were and what we were doing. We couldn’t undertake any complex task and remember what we were doing. We certainly couldn’t drive a car or even cross a street.

If we pay attention to our own consciousnesses closely, we find that, as each moment of our experience transpires, we take in sensations from outside in the world and inside in our bodies and then we layer feelings and thoughts and images on top of these sensations to form a moment of experience with some coherence and meaning. And this moment of experience passes its sensations and feelings and thoughts and images on to the next moment of experience with some relative coherence.

Now, with an untrained mind, our sensations and feelings and thoughts and images kind of jump around outside of our control. But with a relatively trained mind, we can focus in a way that allows us to maintain a constant stream of sensations and feelings and thoughts and images and choose what we want to focus that stream on in an expansion of our consciousnesses. That is the gift of mindfulness and meditation. Using Whitehead’s language, we can say that we can work to shift our mental prehensions to embrace a different and more powerful form or idea of what it is to be human.

Sep 7, 2024

A Reply to Strawson: Physicalism Does Not Entail Panpsychism

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Why a blog post and not a proper response in a philosophy journal? My very first journal submission is still in the review process, close to two months later, for one. Secondly, blogging allows me to be pedantic, to be human, that is, to express frustration, to show anger, to be candid; in other words, blogging allows me to be myself. Probably of highest priority is the fact that I do not want my first publication in the philosophy of mind to be a response. I want to eventually outline my own theory of consciousness, which is strongly hinted at here, and I prefer for that to be my first contribution to the philosophy of mind. I do not find panpsychism convincing and I think there is another theory of consciousness, similar to panpsychism in ways, that is much more cogent. I have outlined some qualms I have with panpsychism before; to people new to the blog, you can read here.

Sep 7, 2024

Picking up good vibes from a stranger? That might be your neurons aligning

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, media & arts, neuroscience

Imagine you’re sitting across from a friend, having a conversation.


I’m a die-hard Beach Boys fan. In one of their most famous songs, they sing about “pickin’ up good vibrations” from a girl. We’ve all felt those “good vibes” when we’re connecting with someone new. I used to think that feeling was a mysterious, mystical experience — something I couldn’t fully explain that bonded me with some friends and strangers more easily than others.

It turns out that “good vibes” aren’t as mysterious as I thought.

Continue reading “Picking up good vibes from a stranger? That might be your neurons aligning” »

Sep 7, 2024

Uncertainty Minimization and Pattern Recognition in Volvox Carteri and Volvox Aureus

Posted by in categories: biological, computing, neuroscience

Learning and a spectrum of other behavioral competencies allow organisms to rapidly adapt to dynamically changing environmental variations. The emerging field of diverse intelligence seeks to understand what systems, besides ones with complex brains, exhibit these capacities. Here, we tested predictions of a general computational framework based on the free energy principle in neuroscience but applied to aneural biological process as established previously, by demonstrating and manipulating pattern recognition in a simple aneural organism, the green algae Volvox. Our studies of the adaptive photoresponse in Volvox reveal that aneural organisms can distinguish between patterned and randomized inputs and indicate how this is achieved mechanistically.

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