A task in which participants learned to perform inference led to the formation of hippocampal representations whose geometric properties reflected the latent structure of the task, indicating that abstract or disentangled neural representations are important for complex cognition.
University of Colorado Boulder scientists have discovered that proteins left by COVID-19 can significantly lower cortisol levels in the brain, leading to heightened immune responses to new stressors.
This research, focusing on the neurological symptoms of Long COVID, utilized rats to demonstrate how SARS-CoV-2 antigens persist in the body and alter brain function. This persistent effect could explain the severe and varied symptoms of Long COVID, suggesting potential directions for further research and symptom management strategies.
Understanding covid-19’s long-term impact on the brain.
Our brains constantly retouch the past with the colors of the present, putting a fresh version of ourselves on display.
Our brains are not designed to give us the entirety of reality.
Remembering is dominated by the perspective we have in the moment.
Insights in 2023’s Why We Remember by Charan…
A study in @ Nature identifies using mouse models a neural circuit that may underpin pain relief caused by the placebo effect.
Analgesia from the expectation of pain relief is mediated by rostral anterior cingulate cortex neurons that project to the pontine nucleus.
The study answers how people can keep learning new things for a lifetime without using up all of their neurons.
This study uses a natural experiment with game console lotteries to identify the causal effect of video gaming on mental well-being in Japan (2020–2022). Results show that video gaming reduced psychological distress and improved life satisfaction.
The entire universe may have an internal mind—or the whole idea of consciousness could be a sham. Here’s why scientists still can’t agree.
The progress of science in the last 400 years is mind-blowing. Who would have thought we’d be able to trace the history of our universe to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and the quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.
For all of these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same thing as “scientism”, which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness is revealing, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.
Perhaps the most worked out form of scientism was the early 20th century movement knows as logical positivism. The logical positivists signed up to the “verification principle”, according to which a sentence whose truth can’t be tested through observation and experiments was either logically trivial or meaningless gibberish. With this weapon, they hoped to dismiss all metaphysical questions as not merely false but nonsense.
There is a theory dubbed “quantum consciousness,” which stipulates that brain functions and consciousness are derived from quantum effects like the collapse of the quantum wavefunction.
This is a strange part of quantum physics, where particles go from a state of simultaneous properties to a more “normal” state where they have one defined characteristic. It has notably been popularized by the concept of Schrödinger’s cat.
Consciousness creep.
Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it.
Our machines could become self-aware without our knowing it. We need a better way to define and test for consciousness.
