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POPSBrain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements Farné says the same kind of brain "plasticity" might be involved in regaining control of a transplanted hand or a prosthetic limb when the original has been lost. The brain might also readily incorporate cyborg additions – a cyborg arm or other body part – into its body schema, says Farné, "and possibly new body parts differing in shape and/or number, for example four arms." Small implants such as pacemakers are inserted in the existing body so do not need to be accepted by the body schema, adds Farné, "but a pair of wings would – that would be tough!"
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POPSAfter Image, try it at home :) Cool tricks... Or perhaps it reveals a deeper sight to the way the nervous system functions; (A system with internal procedure, that correlates to the world outside, but certainly does not create an absolute representation of it...) an interesting experiment a la Maturana and Varela.
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POPSUnlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain more from the discussion: "it turns out, actually, that our brains are constructing representations for all the possible actions with all the possible objects in front of us and then tamping them down. You can see this in patients who have lost some inhibitory controls because they’ve had damage to their frontal lobes. You get what’s called utilization behaviors. You get people who, literally anytime you put a comb in front of them, will start combing their hair just because there’s a comb. They’ll use it. If you put a glass in front of them they’ll drink from it. I think that’s probably also true of our emotional responses. There’s much more being generated and then tamped down. So one really important function our brain provides us is the ability to not act on all the possibilities that it’s generating." interesting.
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POPSEnhancing learning through brain stimulation this is an exciting finding. pointing towards ways of enhancing and augmenting basic abilities. i think it ought not to remain in the confines of treating illnesses only. unless we will define unaugmented abilities as illness...
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POPSLove Vaccine "mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy. When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married" :) so after all it is all in the chemistry...
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POPSIt is not the dope, it's the dopamine :) I think this finding is interesting in the light of the latest and fast growing body of experimental results in neuroscience; finding correlation (some are straight forward, and not very complex) of so called unique attributes to genetics and physiology. this might carry with it a fundamental perceptual change. first we learned that the earth is not the center, than we realized that the human emergence is part of a bigger continuum (evolution that is) and now we come to know that one own psyche is not unique...
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POPSBionic sex chip I think it may be more influential than meets the eye; both in the way sex is perceived and operated in society, and in boosting the augmentation revolution that is coming.
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POPSGod Or Science? It is the human need to know that gave birth to god/religion as an overall description that provides answers. it is that need that gives birth to an alternative worldview, such as science to replace the older theories.
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POPSFalse Memory Syndrome there is the danger of false memory syndrome, defined by the Royal College of Psychiatrists as the recollection of an event that did not occur, but which the individual subsequently strongly believes. Some therapists think that adults who were abused as children but cannot recall the incident can be helped to "recover" their memory. The RCP disputes this, stating that it leads to the creation of false memories: "The evidence does not support the view that memory enhancement techniques actually enhance memory… these are powerful and dangerous methods of persuasion." Interesting reading and thought provoking. Can we trust, that which seems so true... meaning our own mind?
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POPSAre Crime and Punishment connected? Another intriguing result of the study was that the part of the brain that third-party subjects used to determine guilt in this study was the same brain area that has previously been found to be involved in punishing unfair economic behavior in two-party interactions. “The convergence of findings between second-party and third-party punishment studies suggests that impartial legal decision-making may not be fundamentally different from the reasoning used in deciding to punish those who have harmed us personally,” objectivity seems to be an invented concept, that has no correlate in the way the brain perceives.
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POPSThe brain and us... Now that we know a basis that affects, we can start relating to it. So i welcome these discoveries not as finite, but as a beginning...
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POPSIs he sexy? well that depends if she is ovulating :) At other points during the cycle, women will prefer more feminized male faces, as they might signal a higher willingness of the males to invest in offspring. This is a great example to the biases that constantly dictate ones sense of reality! the way out is not easy...
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POPS"Do the robot", in the art of dance, of course. Last quote from him: "If you think about it, we are all made of mechanisms and neurones and codes and stuff. Human hardware and software. That's more fundamental to dance than characters and stories, isn't it?" Interesting
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POPSLoss Aversion Very interesting read. "In our distant past, this was an important survival mechanism, since it allowed us to protect each other from predators." The concept of loss aversion is escorting human everywhere. the prospect of losing is terrifying the human and overclouds the sense of adventure and game.
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POPSHeart-Warming News on Hot Coffee I like this piece, mainly because it points to so much of the unseen ecology that affects a human on the immediacy. something to think about and drink next time we are so convinced about something...
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POPSErasing fear In a number of experiments they instilled a trauma in the mouse by applying electric shocks - but then removed the memory with a calcium enzyme called CamKII. But fears both new and old alike were wiped clean or over-written by over dosing the mouse's brain with CamKII. Eventually the research could lead to a pill or injection being administered to a person at the same time as they are asked to recall the painful memory or fear. That is very interesting. It can be a meaningful one, but only if it is part of an overall different description of what is a human? ?-)
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POPSArtificial memory storage this is amazing. if it works it can be used not only for the sick, why not having an external hard drive to store memories, and new information, or to download some existing one, making space to newer? sounds intriguing, and yes it woulkd change human identity. But hey, why not?
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POPSFrom Paralysis to function, how far are we? closer now Wow, very impressive progress! "the study, which appears in the journal Nature, scientists at the University of Washington in Seattle implanted ultra thin electrodes into the brains of macaques which had been trained to play a game that involved rotating their wrists to the left and right. While the monkeys played, the electrodes picked up electrical signals in their brains that made them tense different muscles. The scientists then injected the monkeys with a chemical that temporarily paralysed their arms. This time, signals from nerves in their brains were fed into a computer, cleaned up and magnified, and sent down a wire to muscles in the monkeys' wrists. When the monkeys tried to play the game again, they were unable to at first, but soon learned to control their wrist movements using the brain implant. when he found something worked, he quickly repeated it and adopted the strategy" very nice!
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POPSMan 'roused from coma' by a magnetic field after around 15 sessions something happened. "You started talking to him and he would turn his head and look at you," "Villa started obeying one-step commands, such as following the movement of a thumb and speaking single words." "Villa is by no means cured. But he is easier to care for and can interact with visitors "
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POPSCyborg is possible A very interesting direction, augmenting the bodily capabilities, the interface of biology and technology takes a step further.
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POPSLearning How Not To Be Afraid When Kandel's team used radiation to blunt the birth of new cells in the dentate gyrus, they discovered that their interventions both slowed safety learning and stunted the antidepressant effects of learned safety. Another study that points to the origin of fear as a biological entity. the glitch is it turning into anxiety.
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POPSThe bliss of ignorance I for one, cannot see why one would prefer to remain ignorant. Happiness, besides being overrated, is no excuse for voting ignorance.
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POPSMinority Report is being materialized "The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed" “As we enter more fully into the era of mapping and understanding the brain, society will face an increasing number of important ethical, legal and social issues raised by these new technologies,” Mr. Greely, the Stanford bioethicist, and his colleague Judy Illes wrote last year in the American Journal of Law & Medicine." Interesting article. Raises many questions; a) the easiest one is is it valid? why easiest because it can be one day answered, at least i assume so. b) if it is valid, should we use it? where is the line of privacy? should there be a line as such? i find it fundamentally challenging the human conceptual descriptions of what is self, identity, society and its relation. Fascinating. what do you think?
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POPSRemember = Reliving Very interesting findings. if it holds true to 'older' memories, then it raises a question; as the neural network molds and reshapes, so does our memories? if so maybe we can only remember who we are, rather than what we were...
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POPSSubliminal learning. "The researchers collected scans of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, to investigate the specific brain circuitry that is linked to subliminal instrumental conditioning. "The ventral striatum responded to subliminal cues and to visible outcomes in a manner that closely approximates our computational algorithm, expressing reward expected values and prediction errors," says Dr. Pessiglione. "We conclude that, even without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brain can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making."
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