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Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ category: Page 826

May 6, 2018

The Post-Human Generation–An Engineered Evolution

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

On a recent BBC World Service program (News Hour Extra, 12.18.15), a group of space scientists were gathered to discuss these and other aspects of the post-human era. “What about the human soul”, the moderator asked, wondering whether or not these post-humans would still be human. None of the participants were particularly troubled by the question, since they all had assumed that the soul was no more than the particular configurations of DNA which resulted in varying degre…es of insight, intelligence, creativity, and sensitivity. Post-humans will be no different, they all agreed. Only their individual genomes will have been altered to produce a very different human reality – in other words a different human soul.


Once the human genome was completely sequenced; once efforts to recombine DNA had become a reality; and once a mind-computer interface had been realized, there was never any doubt that a post-human era was coming.

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May 3, 2018

Researchers are developing a brain editing device

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley recently unveiled a new experimental device for editing brain activity.

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May 3, 2018

Stephen Hawking’s Final Theory About Our Universe Has Just Been Published, And It Will Melt Your Brain

Posted by in categories: cosmology, neuroscience, physics

Posthumous journal.


Groundbreaking physicist Stephen Hawking left us one last shimmering piece of brilliance before he died: his final paper, detailing his last theory on the origin of the Universe, co-authored with Thomas Hertog from KU Leuven.

The paper, published today in the Journal of High Energy Physics, puts forward that the Universe is far less complex than current multiverse theories suggest.

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May 3, 2018

New proof reveals fundamental limits of scientific knowledge

Posted by in categories: mathematics, neuroscience, space, supercomputing

A new proof by SFI Professor David Wolpert sends a humbling message to would-be super intelligences: you can’t know everything all the time.

The proof starts by mathematically formalizing the way an “inference device,” say, a scientist armed with a supercomputer, fabulous experimental equipment, etc., can have knowledge about the state of the universe around them. Whether that scientist’s knowledge is acquired by observing their universe, controlling it, predicting what will happen next, or inferring what happened in the past, there’s a mathematical structure that restricts that knowledge. The key is that the inference device, their knowledge, and the physical variable that they (may) know something about, are all subsystems of the same universe. That coupling restricts what the device can know. In particular, Wolpert proves that there is always something that the inference device cannot predict, and something that they cannot remember, and something that they cannot observe.

“In some ways this formalism can be viewed as many different extensions of [Donald MacKay’s] statement that ‘a prediction concerning the narrator’s future cannot account for the effect of the narrator’s learning that prediction,’” Wolpert explains. “Perhaps the simplest extension is that, when we formalize [inference devices] mathematically, we notice that the same impossibility results that hold for predictions of the future—MacKay’s concern—also hold for memories of the past. Time is an arbitrary variable—it plays no role in terms of differing states of the universe.”

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May 2, 2018

Why genetic IQ differences between ‘races’ are unlikely

Posted by in categories: evolution, genetics, neuroscience

The idea that intelligence can differ between populations has made headlines again, but the rules of evolution make it implausible.

Kevin Mitchell

Associate professor of genetics and neuroscience at Trinity College Dublin.

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May 2, 2018

Singularity Hypotheses Analysis

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience, physics, singularity, transhumanism

Publication numbers are in: 55 thousand downloads! 🎉😁🍾.


Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment offers authoritative, jargon-free essays and critical commentaries on accelerating technological progress and the notion of technological singularity. It focuses on conjectures about the intelligence explosion, transhumanism, and whole brain emulation. Recent years have seen a plethora of forecasts about the profound, disruptive impact that is likely to result from further progress in these areas. Many commentators however doubt the scientific rigor of these forecasts, rejecting them as speculative and unfounded. We therefore invited prominent computer scientists, physicists, philosophers, biologists, economists and other thinkers to assess the singularity hypotheses. Their contributions go beyond speculation, providing deep insights into the main issues and a balanced picture of the debate.

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May 2, 2018

China is monitoring employees’ brain waves and emotions — and the technology boosted one company’s profits

Posted by in categories: military, neuroscience

Employees’ brain waves are reportedly being monitored in factories, state-owned enterprises, and the military across China.


It’s being used to identify shifts in employees’ moods to increase productivity and profits.

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Apr 30, 2018

Brain imaging show that patients with Alzheimer’s disease can still remember and enjoy their favorite songs

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

Not surprising and yet fascinating to actually see — “The researchers found that music activates the brain, causing whole regions to communicate. By listening to the personal soundtrack, the visual network, the salience network, the executive network and the cerebellar and corticocerebellar network pairs all showed significantly higher functional connectivity.”


“Ever get chills lis­ten­ing to a par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing piece of music? You can thank the salience net­work of the brain for that emo­tion­al joint. Sur­pris­ing­ly, this region also remains an island of remem­brance that is spared from the rav­ages of Alzheimer’s dis­ease. Researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah Health are look­ing to this region of the brain to devel­op music-based treat­ments to help alle­vi­ate anx­i­ety in patients with demen­tia. Their research will appear in the April online issue of The Jour­nal of Pre­ven­tion of Alzheimer’s Disease…

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Apr 29, 2018

Prosthetic Memory System Successful in Humans, Study Finds

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

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory.

In the pilot study, published in today’s Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37 percent improvement over baseline measurements. The research was funded by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

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Apr 29, 2018

An Introductory Guide to Understand how ANNs Conceptualize New Ideas (using Embedding)

Posted by in category: neuroscience

Here’s something you don’t hear everyday – everything we perceive is just a best case probabilistic prediction by our brain, based on our past encounters and knowledge gained through other mediums. This might sound extremely counter intuitive because we have always imagined that our brain mostly gives us deterministic answers.

We’ll do a small experiment to showcase this logic. Take a look at the below image:

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