Neuroscience

What? After all the naturalist pop psych lectures we paid good money for at the U? Well, suckers r’ us. From Medical News Today: A new research study contradicts the established view that so-called split-brain patients have a split consciousness. Instead, the researchers behind the study, led by UvA psychologist Yair Pinto, have found strong evidence showing that despite being characterised by little to no communication between the right and left brain hemispheres, split brain does not cause two independent conscious perceivers in one brain. Their results are published in the latest edition of the journal Brain. Split brain is a lay term to describe the result of a corpus callosotomy, a surgical procedure first performed in the 1940s to Read More ›

At the Economist, anyway: One common tactic in brain science is to compare damaged brains with healthy ones. If damage to part of the brain causes predictable changes in behaviour, then researchers can infer what that part of the brain does. In rats, for instance, damaging the hippocampuses—two small, banana-shaped structures buried towards the bottom of the brain—reliably interferes with the creatures’ ability to recognise objects. When applied to the chip, though, that method turned up some interesting false positives. The researchers found, for instance, that disabling one particular group of transistors prevented the chip from running the boot-up sequence of “Donkey Kong”—the Nintendo game that introduced Mario the plumber to the world—while preserving its ability to run other games. Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: They have determined that several thousands of the retroviruses that have established themselves in our genome may serve as “docking platforms” for a protein called TRIM28. This protein has the ability to “switch off” not only viruses but also the standard genes adjacent to them in the DNA helix, allowing the presence of ERV to affect gene expression. This switching-off mechanism may behave differently in different people, since retroviruses are a type of genetic material that may end up in different places in the genome. This makes it a possible tool for evolution, and even a possible underlying cause of neurological diseases. In fact, there are studies that indicate a deviating regulation of ERV in several neurological diseases Read More ›

From Salk Institute: “Our research shows that, despite having exactly the same genes and neurons as adults, adolescent roundworms have completely different food-seeking preferences and abilities,” says Sreekanth Chalasani, associate professor in Salk’s Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory and senior author of the paper published in eNeuro in January 2017. “It is in adulthood that we finally see the worms become more efficient and competent at finding food.” The microscopic Caenorhabditis elegans worm may seem like an odd source of insight into human brain development. With only 302 neurons to humans’ almost 100 billion, C. elegans is a vastly simpler organism but its basic neurological circuitry has many similarities to ours. And, since scientists have already mapped the adult roundworms’ neurons anatomically Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: When you’re doing two things at once – like listening to the radio while driving – your brain organizes itself into two, functionally independent networks, almost as if you temporarily have two brains. That’s according to a fascinating new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientists Shuntaro Sasai and colleagues. It’s called Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm. To study authors link their work to the experiences of split-brain epilepsy patients. In other words, when the GPS voice was helping the participants to drive (“integrated task”), the brain ‘driving network’ and ‘listening network’ were acting in concert, with a high degree of functional connectivity. But when the drivers were listening to the radio show (“split task”), Read More ›

From Jennifer Ouellette at Quanta: The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain — which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer. … isher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. Read More ›

John Searle gives a nice talk at Google about real intelligence vs. machine intelligence. The conversation is interesting for a number of reasons, including some historical background of Searle’s famous “Chinese Room Argument.”
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From Edwin Cartlidge at Physics World: Consciousness appears to arise naturally as a result of a brain maximizing its information content. So says a group of scientists in Canada and France, which has studied how the electrical activity in people’s brains varies according to individuals’ conscious states. The researchers find that normal waking states are associated with maximum values of what they call a brain’s “entropy”. Statistical mechanics is very good at explaining the macroscopic thermodynamic properties of physical systems in terms of the behaviour of those systems’ microscopic constituent particles. Emboldened by this success, physicists have increasingly been trying to do a similar thing with the brain: namely, using statistical mechanics to model networks of neurons. Key to this Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A new study is the first to demonstrate beneficial placebo effect for lower back pain sufferers who knew they were taking ‘fake pills.’ Patients who knowingly took placebos reported 30 percent less pain and 29 percent reduction in disability compared to control group. ‘Open-labeling’ addresses longtime ethical dilemma, allowing patients to choose placebo treatments with informed consent. … “These findings turn our understanding of the placebo effect on its head,” said joint senior author Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “This new research demonstrates that the placebo effect is not necessarily elicited by patients’ conscious Read More ›

From Amy Ellis Nutt at Washington Post: For the first time, scientists have helped a paralyzed man experience the sense of touch in his mind-controlled robotic arm. For the cutting-edge experiment, a collaboration between the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, electrodes smaller than a grain of sand were implanted in the sensory cortex of the man’s brain. The electrodes received signals from a robot arm. When a researcher pressed the fingers of the prosthesis, the man felt the pressure in the fingers of his paralyzed right hand, effectively bypassing his damaged spinal cord. The results of the experiment, which have been repeated over several months with 30-year-old Nathan Copeland, offer a breakthrough in the restoration Read More ›

Oh, and the mind is an illusion that the meat somehow produces? A new book noted at Springer seems poised to try: Many believe that the language and concepts of philosophy will eventually be superseded by those of neuroscience. This collection of essays questions this assumption and attempts to show how philosophy can contribute to real explanatory progress in neuroscience while remaining faithful to the full complexity of the phenomena of life and mind. The general orientation of the volume is Aristotelian, as it seeks to promote a non-reductive understanding of subjectivity that is firmly rooted in biology, paying close attention to the special formal and material properties of living systems. However, its contributors represent a diversity of perspectives and Read More ›

… because we aren’t really anyone anyway, says neuroscientist. From Cody Delistraty, interviewing neurocientist Thomas Metzinger (Being No One, 2003) at Nautilus: We know there is a robust experience of self-consciousness; I don’t doubt this. The question is how could something like that emerge in evolution in an information-processing system like the human brain? Can we at all conceive of that being possible? Many philosophers would have said no, that’s something irreducibly subjective. In Being No One I tried to show how the sense of self, the robust experience of being someone, could emerge in a natural way in the course of many millions of years of evolution. The question was how to arrive at a novel theory of self-consciousness, Read More ›

From neuroscience PhD student Joel Frohlich at Psychology Today: While it is impossible to ever truly breach this epistemological hurdle, most of us operate on the assumption that other minds exist and individuals with behavior similar to our own experience the world as we do. Accepting this axiom, meaningful questions may be asked: Which brain architectures best support consciousness? Why does consciousness feel like “one thing” despite containing so much information? Why does consciousness vanish during seizures? Why do cerebellar lesions minimally impact consciousness? Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi has developed a system to answer these questions using the framework of information theory. In this context, information is a reduction in uncertainty, as in knowing the value of a variable with many Read More ›

As advanced by cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, From. Adam Frank at NPR: To paraphrase the website Understanding Evolution, “fitness” is used to describe how good a particular organism is at getting its offspring into the next generation relative to the other organisms around it. When people study evolution using mathematics or computers, they imagine there are compact ways of describing what makes an organism fit for a particular environment. That’s what they mean by “fitness functions.” So imagine you have two kinds of creatures living in an environment. The first is tuned to respond directly to objective reality — the actual independent reality out there. The other creature has behavior only tuned to its, and the environment’s, fitness function. The Read More ›

From Tina Hesman Saey at ScienceNews: Color vision may actually work like a colorized version of a black-and-white movie, a new study suggests. Cone cells, which sense red, green or blue light, detect white more often than colors, researchers report September 14 in Science Advances. The textbook-rewriting discovery could change scientists’ thinking about how color vision works. Like a coloring book. The large number of cells that detect white (and black — the absence of white) create a high-resolution black-and-white picture of a person’s surroundings, picking out edges and fine details. Red- and green-signaling cells fill in low-resolution color information. More. Maybe that helps explain the craze for adult coloring? Not just that some people have too much time on Read More ›