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Comment by Neal 5 hours ago

Mind control, finally. =)

Comment by doone 15 hours ago

neurosciencestuff:

The Fractal Nature of the Brain: EEG Data Suggests That the Brain F...

The brain has been traditionally viewed as a deterministic machine where certain inputs give rise to certain outputs. However, there is a growing body of work that suggests this is not the case. The high importance of initial inputs suggests that the brain may be working in the realms of chaos, with small changes in initial inputs leading to the production of strange attractors. This may also be reflected in the physical structure of the brain which may also be fractal. EEG data is a good place to look for the underlying patterns of chaos in the brain since it samples many millions of neurons simultaneously. Several studies have arrived at a fractal dimension of between 5 and 8 for human EEG data. This suggests that the brain operates in a higher dimension than the 4 of traditional space-time. These extra dimensions suggest that quantum gravity may play a role in generating consciousness.

(Image courtesy: Kookmin University)

Comment by doone 16 hours ago

That’s some science experiment — who’s gonna stick a funnel up his ass?

Comment by Dallas the Phallus 16 hours ago

I like to just sit here and make it go in and out.

Comment by doone 16 hours ago

The Amazing GIF You Can Control With Your Mind

Look at the image for long enough and you can make the train change direction simply by thinking about it. Freaky.posted on May 20, 2013 at 9:25am EDT

Source: bitsandpieces.us  /  via: @benfraserlee

Comment by doone on May 13, 2013 at 8:54pm

Algorithm Intelligence

MAY 13 2013 @ 6:37PM

Researchers in the emerging field of Deep Learning hope ”to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does”:

In the early days of artificial intelligence, [computer science professor Andrew] Ng says, the prevailing opinion was that human intelligence derived from thousands of simple agents working in concert, what MIT’s Marvin Minsky called “The Society of Mind.” To achieve AI, engineers believed, they would have to build and combine thousands of individual computing modules. One agent, or algorithm, would mimic language. Another would handle speech. And so on. It seemed an insurmountable feat.

What changed? Now “there’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm”:

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

Comment by doone on May 10, 2013 at 10:01am

SPERM CELLS CREATED FROM FEMALE EMBRYO

Roger Highfield in The Telegraph:

Sperm cells have been created from a female human embryo in a remarkable breakthrough that suggests it may be possible for lesbian couples to have their own biological children.

British scientists who had already coaxed male bone marrow cells to develop into primitive sperm cells have now repeated the feat with female embryonic stem cells.

The University of Newcastle team that has achieved the feat is now applying for permission to turn the bone marrow of a woman into sperm which, if successful, would make the method more practical than with embryonic cells.

It raises the possibility of lesbian couples one day having children who share both their genes as sperm created from the bone marrow of one woman could be used to fertilise an egg from her partner.

Men and women differ because of what are called sex chromosomes. Both have an X chromosome. But only men possess a Y chromosome that carries several genes thought to be essential to make sperm, so there has been scepticism that female stem cells could ever be used to make sperm.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 07:44 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on May 8, 2013 at 2:49pm

Skeletons from Jason And The Argonauts

Image by Summer Anne Burton

Comment by doone on May 4, 2013 at 8:04am

HOW TO CREATE A MIND

From The New York Times:

Kurzweil, author of “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology,” may be best known as a polymath inventor and futurist, but he’s really a cyborg sent back from the year 2029 to save humanity from the nature-nurture debate. His mission is not to provide a final score (nature 20 percent, nurture 80 percent!) but to reframe the dispute and the ancient anxieties that feed into it: What is the essence of identity? How do we slip the noose of determinism? Is our free will really free, and if it is free, is it really ours? These questions shift when you factor in technology and understand that the human future will be shaped by nature-­nurture-manufacture.

Kurzweil examines the human brain and makes a case for its artificial enhancement, if not total replacement. Apparently, the trick to reverse-engineering a brain is wrestling with “many billions of cells and trillions of connections” in order to extract the simple operating principles. He discusses how evolution expanded the human neocortex, and its current constraints. We can’t squeeze much more neocortex into our skulls, but we can augment our frontal lobes with technology. He walks readers through breathtaking experiments, like an artificial replacement for a rat hippocampus, and he proposes a few tweaks to the classic brain design, like a digital module to root out and resolve cognitive dissonance. Kurzweil’s vision of our super-enhanced future is completely sane and calmly reasoned, and his book should nicely smooth the path for the earth’s robot overlords, who, it turns out, will be us.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:28 AM | Permalink

Comment by doone on May 2, 2013 at 7:31pm

A LITTLE BRAIN TRAINING GOES A LONG WAY

From Nature:

People who use a ‘brain-workout’ program for just 10 hours have a mental edge over their peers even a year later, researchers report today in PLoS ONE¹. The search for a regimen of mental callisthenics to stave off age-related cognitive decline is a booming area of research — and a multimillion-dollar business. But critics argue that even though such computer programs can improve performance on specific mental tasks, there is scant proof that they have broader cognitive benefits. For the study, adults aged 50 and older played a computer game designed to boost the speed at which players process visual stimuli. Processing speed is thought to be “the first domino that falls in cognitive decline”, says Fredric Wolinsky, a public-health researcher at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who led the research. The game was developed by academic researchers but is now sold under the nameDouble Decision by Posit Science, based in San Francisco, California. (Posit did not fund the study.) Players are timed on how fast they click on an image in the centre of the screen and on others that appear around the periphery. The program ratchets up the difficulty as a player’s performance improves.

Participants played the training game for 10 hours on site, some with an extra 4-hour ‘booster’ session later, or for 10 hours at home. A control group worked on computerized crossword puzzles for 10 hours on site. Researchers measured the mental agility of all 621 subjects before the brain training began, and again one year later, using eight well-established tests of cognitive performance. The control group’s scores did not increase over the course of that year, but all the brain-training groups significantly upped their scores in the Useful Field of View test — which requires a subject to identify items in a scene with just a quick glance — and four others. When they compared the study participants' scores to those expected for people their ages, the researchers found improvements that translated to 3-4.1 years of protection in age-related decline for the field-of-view test and from 1.5-6.6 years for the other tasks. “It was interesting that it didn’t matter whether you were on site at the clinic or just did this at home — you got basically the same bang for your buck,” says Frederick Unverzagt, a neuropsychologist at the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, who was not involved with the study.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:47 AM | Permalink |

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