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Neuroscience & Consciousness

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Place telepathic bets with "Uber for psychics" Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious. The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you and me yet lack subjective experience.

Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious

Frontotemporal dementia. Six types of dementia involving the frontal or temporal lobes The frontotemporal dementias (FTD) encompass six types of dementia involving the frontal or temporal lobes.

Frontotemporal dementia

They are: behavioral variant of FTD, semantic variant primary progressive aphasia, nonfluent agrammatic variant primary progressive aphasia, corticobasal syndrome, progressive supranuclear palsy, and FTD associated with motor neuron disease.[1] The brain of a lifelong bully looks different than the general population. Long-term offenders have different brain structure, study says. Parents should not worry about their teenagers’ delinquent behaviour provided they were well behaved in their earlier childhood, according to researchers behind a study that suggests those who offend throughout their life showed antisocial behaviour from a young age and have a markedly different brain structure as adults.

Long-term offenders have different brain structure, study says

According to figures from the Ministry of Justice, 24% of males in England and Wales aged 10–52 in 2006 had a conviction, compared with 6% of females. MRI captures the most detailed view yet of a whole human brain. Over 100 hours of scanning has yielded a 3-D picture of the whole human brain that’s more detailed than ever before.

MRI captures the most detailed view yet of a whole human brain

The new view, enabled by a powerful MRI, has the resolution potentially to spot objects that are smaller than 0.1 millimeters wide. “We haven’t seen an entire brain like this,” says electrical engineer Priti Balchandani of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who was not involved in the study. “It’s definitely unprecedented.”

The scan shows brain structures such as the amygdala in vivid detail, a picture that might lead to a deeper understanding of how subtle changes in anatomy could relate to disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder. To get this new look, researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and elsewhere studied a brain from a 58-year-old woman who died of viral pneumonia. Sign Up For the Latest from Science News Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox. The Brain Senses Touch beyond the Body. Luke Miller, a cognitive neuroscientist, was toying with a curtain rod in his apartment when he was struck by a strange realization.

The Brain Senses Touch beyond the Body

When he hit an object with the rod, even without looking, he could tell where it was making contact like it was a sensory extension of his body. “That’s kind of weird,” Miller recalls thinking to himself. “So I went [to the lab], and we played around with it in the lab.” Consciousness Doesn’t Depend on Language - Issue 76: Language. The contrast could not have been starker—here was one of the world’s most revered figures, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, expressing his belief that all life is sentient, while I, as a card-carrying neuroscientist, presented the contemporary Western consensus that some animals might, perhaps, possibly, share the precious gift of sentience, of conscious experience, with humans.

Consciousness Doesn’t Depend on Language - Issue 76: Language

The setting was a symposium between Buddhist monk-scholars and Western scientists in a Tibetan monastery in Southern India, fostering a dialogue in physics, biology, and brain science. Buddhism has philosophical traditions reaching back to the fifth century B.C. It defines life as possessing heat (i.e., a metabolism) and sentience, that is, the ability to sense, to experience, and to act. According to its teachings, consciousness is accorded to all animals, large and small—human adults and fetuses, monkeys, dogs, fish, and even lowly cockroaches and mosquitoes. Also in Neuroscience. Is deep brain stimulation for better health worth the risk? In 1963, a neurophysiologist named José Delgado demonstrated the effects of invasive electronic brain stimulation.

Is deep brain stimulation for better health worth the risk?

He implanted electrodes into the brain of a highly aggressive bull, and then joined the animal in a bullring, armed with a hand-held radio transmitter to remotely activate the electrodes. NICC Image Server: Home. EEG scan detects hidden consciousness in unresponsive brain injury patients. A neural implant can translate brain activity into sentences.

To communicate, people unable to talk often rely on small eye movements to spell out words, a painstakingly slow process.

A neural implant can translate brain activity into sentences

Now, using signals picked up by a brain implant, scientists have pulled entire sentences from the brain. Some of these reconstructed words, spoken aloud by a virtual vocal cord, are a little garbled. But overall, the sentences are understandable, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco report in the April 25 Nature. Creating the audible synthetic sentences required years of analysis after brain signals were recorded, and the technique is not ready to be used outside of a lab. Converting cells into new neurons could lead to a pill that repairs brain damage. Computers Determine States of Consciousness.

Consciousness is a peculiar, even supernatural idea.

Computers Determine States of Consciousness

From three pounds of flesh emerges an awareness of the body that houses it and the world around it. Can Art Solve the Hard Problem? A neuroscientist explains the limits and possibilities of using technology to read our thoughts. In 2007, The New York Times published an op-ed titled “This is Your Brain on Politics.”

A neuroscientist explains the limits and possibilities of using technology to read our thoughts

The authors imaged the brains of swing voters and, using that information, interpreted what the voters were feeling about presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “As I read this piece,” writes Russell Poldrack, “my blood began to boil.” Poldrack is a neuroscientist at Stanford University and the author of The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts (out now from Princeton University Press). His research focuses on what we can learn from brain imagining techniques such as fMRI, which measures blood activity in the brain as a proxy for brain activity. And one of the clearest conclusions, he writes, is that activity in a particular brain region doesn’t actually tell us what the person is experiencing. This Sci-Fi Tool Lets You Shine a Light on the Brain. Famed neuroscientist and Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal believed that in the central nervous system (CNS) — the brain and spine — nerves don’t regenerate.

It was a dismal proclamation but one that held for nearly 100 years. Until now. Neuroprediction: Using Neuroscience to Predict Violent Criminal Behavior. Can Neuroscientists Measure Free Will? EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the second of a three-part series on the Human Mind Conference, an “interdisciplinary event” held in Cambridge, England, in June 2017, “bringing together a wide range of experts from across the humanities and the cognitive sciences to discuss key aspects of mental life and experience.” If you’ve ever read an article proclaiming that neuroscience disproves free will, you’ve probably heard of the Libet experiment. In 1983, Benjamin Libet, a vision and neurology researcher at UC San Francisco, described an experiment in which subjects were asked to move one of their hands whenever they felt like it, and to report the instant at which they first felt the urge to move.

Why do I wake up every morning feeling so tired? The alarm rings, you awaken, and you are still drowsy: why? Being sleepy in the morning does not make any sense; after all, you have just been asleep for the past eight hours. Alex Honnold ‘feels no fear’ scientists say after brain tests, El Capitan climb. Caption Settings Dialog Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. The Brain Defense: Vets with head trauma, stress find mercy in court. Features Posted Mar 01, 2017 11:20 am CST. Brain network of psychopathic criminals functions differently. Behold the Most Complicated Object in the Known Universe - The Leonard Lopate Show. Could US Military Brain Scans Screen Police for Racial Bias? Can functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans and other technology currently being tested on soldiers in the US military be used to screen police recruits for hidden racist attitudes?

History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places. How This Scientist Discovered Coffee Was Reorganizing His Brain. The First Quantified Brain. Why The World Isn’t As It Seems. Did my brain make me do it? Neuroscience and Free Will (2) ListMenziesFreeWill.pdf. This Device Brings “Brave New World” to Life. Perceive this: The human brain controls alpha-band oscillation phase to effect temporal predictions. Standard models of perception are stimulus-driven, meaning that the external perceptual event drives the brain's perception-related activity. Porn 'Addiction' Isn't Really Addiction, Neuroscientists Say. Addiction is not a disease: A neuroscientist argues that it’s time to change our minds on the roots of substance abuse. Psychosurgeons Use Lasers to Burn Away Mental Illness. 'Exploding head syndrome' common in young people: Nearly one in five startled by loud, non-existent noises. A Common Link Among Female Criminals: Brain Injury. Coming Soon—Electronic Mood Control.

Brain-altering devices have hit the mainstream. Sleep Paralysis Linked to Genetics, Anxiety & Stressful Events. Tuning In To The Brain's 'Cocktail Party Effect' Is This the Most Misleading Image in Neuroscience? Alien Abduction or “Accidental Awareness”? Thync. Wearable for state-of-mind shift set for 2015. Photographer Uses Brain Waves To Reveal What People Really Want To Look Like.

The First Successful Demonstration Of Brain-To-Brain Communication In Humans. How extreme isolation warps the mind. The art and science of whispering - Radiotonic. Boost Your Brain’s Power With a 9-Volt Battery and Some Wet Sponges. 'Neural noise' may influence free will, study suggests. Why Did Our Brains Stop Expanding? What Happens to the Brain During Spiritual Experiences? - Lynne Blumberg. Pedophiles' Brains Show Abnormal Reaction to Kids' Faces. Dopamine turns worker ants into warrior queens. Learning New Ideas Alters Brain Cells. This is your brain on art: Why we’re moved by certain works. Scientists Finally Show How Your Thoughts Can Cause Specific Molecular Changes To Your GenesTunedBody. Gene expression changes with meditation. Neurostimulation: The Next Mind-Expanding Idea. Arnon Grunberg Is Writing While Connected to Electrodes.

A Neuroscientist's Radical Theory of How Networks Become Conscious - Wired Science. Your brain sees things you don't. Autonomous sensory meridian response. Herpes Medication Produces "Walking Corpse Syndrome" Recurring dream. Brain stimulation affects compliance with social norms. Synchronized virtual reality heartbeat triggers out-of-body experiences. When Power Goes To Your Head, It May Shut Out Your Heart. The neuroscience of dying: Brain activity continues up to 30 seconds after blood flow stops. Neurobiology of a hallucination. Low dose psychedelics increase neurogenesis, help mice unlearn fear.

Pop neuroscience is bunk! Scientists Declare: Nonhuman Animals Are Conscious. The Vagus Nerve and the Healing Promise of The Sudarshan Kriya. Child Abuse Leaves Distinct Gene Activity Patterns. Meditation Health Benefits: What The Practice Does To Your Body. The Enormous Promise of Psychedelics for Sustaining Health, Happiness and Sanity. The science behind meditation, and why it makes you feel better. How An Unlikely Drug Helps Some Children Consumed By Fear : Shots - Health News. Take a deep breath – scientists working on a stress breath test. Neurologist discovers 'dark patch' inside brains of killers and rapists. What Makes You Feel Fear? : Shots - Health News. First-Ever Incredible Footage of a Thought Being Formed. Nothing to fear but suffocation. Faulty braking system leads to depression. U.S. researchers map emotional intelligence of the brain. Brain Aging Linked to Sleep-Related Memory Decline. Neuromarketing.

Pacemaker-like device being trialled as Alzheimer's treatment. Researchers find way to suppress certain types of memories. The Brain Chemistry of Social and Sexual Monogamy. The Unconscious Brain Can Do Math, Read. Brain implant could warn of the onset of dementia. Are neuroscientists the next great architects? Infant stress linked to teen brain changes. Demystifying the Mind. Your brain on speed dating. Brain Stimulation Gives Tics to Those Without Tourette’s.