Lifeboat Foundation

Motivation is such an intangible aspect of the human spirit that we often forget it has very real, neurochemical origins. We admire it in others and strive for it in ourselves (see: every Nike ad ever made), and now we are getting closer to potentially inducing that motivational feeling with drugs.

John Salamone, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Connecticut with a background in neural and behavioral pharmacology, has been working with the drug company Chronos Therapeutics to develop a drug that can restore motivation in people who have lost it — whether that’s due to the symptoms of depression, struggle with disease, or otherwise. He unveiled his early results on rats this week in a presentation at the Society For Neuroscience’s conference in San Diego, where he tells Inverse his board was bustling with activity:

“Basically we stood there for four hours and were busy the entire time,” says Salamone. The reception was overwhelmingly positive, he adds. “We didn’t have anyone say ‘This is crazy! This will never work!’”.

Continue reading “Potent, Cocaine-Like Motivational Drug Unveiled at Neuroscience Conference” »

I think aspects of our Universe are conscious. Dark matter or the æther perhaps. Stagnancy is death so change inherently means something is making decisions.

A new scientific concept has recently come to light, which scientists are calling “panpsychism.” Panpsychism says that the universe could be capable of consciousness, which could change everything.

Continue reading “Scientists Now Believe That The Universe Itself Is Conscious” »

SpiNNaker was built under the leadership of Professor Steve Furber at The University of Manchester, a principal designer of two products that earned the Queen’s Award for Technology —the ARM 32-bit RISC microprocessor, and the BBC Microcomputer.

“The ultimate objective for the project has always been a million cores in a single computer for real time brain modelling applications, and we have now achieved it, which is fantastic.” — Professor Steve Furber, The University of Manchester

Inspired by the human brain, the SpiNNaker is capable of sending billions of small amounts of information simultaneously. The SpiNNaker has a staggering 1 million processors that are able to perform over 200 million actions per second.

Continue reading “World’s Largest Neuromorphic Supercomputer Activated” »

Sadness Circuit Found In Human Brain : Shots — Health News When people are feeling glum, it often means that brain areas involved in emotion and memory are communicating. Researchers now have observed the circuit in action in humans.

Grunya Sukhareva characterized autism nearly two decades before Austrian doctors Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger.

• By Lina Zeldovich, Spectrum on November 10, 2018

Preliminary finding turns heads at neuroscience meeting.

Prolonged social isolation can do severe, long-lasting damage to the brain.

• By Dana G. Smith on November 9, 2018

You read that correctly. Brain-controlled TVs.

The technology is aimed for people with physical disabilities and should go into testing in Swiss hospitals early next year.

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Continue reading “Samsung is building software to control your TV with your brain” »

A theory called the cultural brain hypothesis could explain extraordinary increases in brain size in humans and other animals over the last few million years, according to a study published in PLOS Computational Biology by Michael Muthukrishna of the London School of Economics and Political Science and Harvard University, and colleagues at the University of British Columbia and Harvard University.