Tag Archives | Brain

On The Amazing Benefits Of Mind Uploading

By on May 17, 2012 in News 39
Photo: Kemitsv (CC)

Photo: Kemitsv (CC)

Music and paying the gas bill have been digitalized, so you knew this was next. How can we stop abusing the environment, give ourselves superintelligence, and live forever? H+ Magazine on the inevitable necessity of switching from spongy flesh brains to uploaded ones:

Universal mind uploading, or universal uploading for short, is the concept (I’m not sure who originated it –if you know, say so in the comments), that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, and permanent dwellings. Some futurists, such as myself, see the eventuality as plausible by as early as 2050.

Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds. If functionalism is true, as many cognitive scientists and philosophers believe, then all the features of human consciousness that we know and love — including all our memories, personality, and sexual quirks — would be preserved through the transition…

Read More: H+ Magazine… Read the rest

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Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?

By on May 17, 2012 in News 24
Psychedelics

Illustration: Dizzy thorns (CC)

So what do you think, psychonauts? Pretty interesting article from Adam Halberstadt and Mark Geyer in Scientific American:

What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain? Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain. Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception.

It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity. Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness, one speculation is that an increase in the spontaneous firing of certain types of brain cells leads to altered sensory and perceptual processing, uncontrolled memory retrieval, and the projection of mental “noise” into the mind’s eye…

Read More: Scientific American… Read the rest

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The Hidden Epidemic Of Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains

By on May 16, 2012 in News 8

k8263-5iA real-life invasion of the body snatchers scenario — tapeworms in your brain are the worst, basically. Via Discovery:

Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH. His best estimate is 1,500 to 2,000. Worldwide, the numbers are vastly higher.

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What Really Happens In An ‘Out Of Body Experience’

By on April 23, 2012 in News 19

oobeSome shocking results are revealed when science tries to explain near-death experiences (NDEs) and other out of body experiences (OBEs), writes Mario Beauregard, author of Brain Wars, at Salon:

…Tales of otherworldly experiences have been part of human cultures seemingly forever, but NDEs as such first came to broad public attention in 1975 by way of American psychiatrist and philosopher Raymond Moody’s popular book Life After Life: The Investigation of a Phenomenon–Survival of Bodily Death. He presented more than 100 case studies of people who experienced vivid mental experiences close to death or during “clinical death” and were subsequently revived to tell the tale. Their experiences were remarkably similar, and Moody coined the term NDE to refer to this phenomenon. The book was popular and controversial, and scientific investigation of NDEs began soon after its publication with the founding, in 1978, of the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS)—the first organization in the world devoted to the scientific study of NDEs and their relationship to mind and consciousness.

… Read the rest

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Plant/Human Symbiosis and the Fall of Humanity: Interview With Tony Wright

By on April 5, 2012 in News 17

TW5 “I believe that the lost secret of human emergence..the undefined catalyst that took a very bright monkey and turned that species into a self-reflecting dreamer..that catalyst has to be sought in these alkaloids in the food chain that were catalyzing higher states of intellectual activity.” — Terence McKenna

Tony Wright and Graham Gynn are authors of Left In The Dark- the book that presents Tony’s research outlining a radical re-interpretation of the current data regarding human evolution and, they contend, our recent degenerated state we call “civilization”. You can read the book for free here. Despite such a young and extreme proposal positive reactions are growing and include such minds as Dennis McKenna, Stanislav Grof, Colin Groves, Michael Winkelman and many others.

There are many mysterious anomalies about human evolution yet to be adequately explained. These include the human brains rapid expansion in size and complexity, why this accelerating expansion suddenly stalled roughly 200,000 years ago and our brains have been shrinking ever since, and why our rare glimpses of genius goes hand in hand with our species wide insanity.… Read the rest

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Beware the God Helmet

By on March 25, 2012 in News 12

God HelmetCreepy. Via Wikipedia:

The God Helmet was not specifically designed to elicit visions of God, but to test several of Persinger’s hypotheses about brain function. The first of these is the Vectorial Hemisphericity Hypothesis, which proposes that the human sense of self has two components, one on each side of the brain, that ordinarily work together but in which the left hemisphere is usually dominant.

Persinger argues that the two hemispheres make different contributions to a single sense of self, but under certain conditions can appear as two separate ‘selves’. Persinger and Koren designed the God Helmet in an attempt to create conditions in which contributions to the sense of self from both cerebral hemispheres is disrupted …

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Internet Makes Smart People Smarter, Dumb People Dumber

By on February 21, 2012 in News 34

Or so claims Kevin Drum, writing for Mother Jones, and using his attempt to Google the price of milk as a supporting anecdote. The theory (that the internet increases “cognitive inequality”) has yet to be tested via scientific study, but, does it ring true?

Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.

… Read the rest

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The ‘Forbidden Colors’ Our Eyes Can’t See

By on February 13, 2012 in News 4

crane-piantanidaCan you imagine a reddish green? Not the muddy brown produced by mixing red and green paint, but a gloriously vivid color that looks a bit like red and a bit like green. How about a color that looks like a mix of blue and yellow, yet isn’t greenish? These exist, but are virtually impossible to see or envision — except with the help of retinal stabilization. Someday we may wear goggles to see the forbidden colors previously off limits. Via Life’s Little Mysteries:

“The observers of this unusual visual stimulus reported seeing the borders between the stripes gradually disappear, and the colors seem to flood into each other. Amazingly, the image seemed to override their eyes’ opponency mechanism, and they said they perceived colors they’d never seen before.”

Even though those colors exist, you’ve probably never seen them. Red-green and yellow-blue are the so-called “forbidden colors.” Composed of pairs of hues whose light frequencies automatically cancel each other out in the human eye, they’re supposed to be impossible to see simultaneously.

… Read the rest

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Smart Drugs To Make Your Brain Function Better

By on February 7, 2012 in News 8

alpha brainThe intrepid Ari Levaux tests so-called “smart” nootropic drugs so that you don’t have to (including Joe Rogan’s Alpha Brain), for The Atlantic:

Hunters will go to great lengths to gain an edge over their prey. You never know where the margin between success and failure may lie, so you wake up extra early, say a prayer, spray bottled deer piss on your boots, and do whatever else you think might increase your odds. My schedule recently got more demanding thanks to a new baby. With less time to kill and another mouth to feed, I’ve had to step up my game.

Hunting can be physically demanding but, assuming that you’re prepared, it’s mostly mental. Staying sharp is how opportunities are created. I ordered a bottle of nootropic pills, in case it might help.

Nootropic (new-tro-pik) is the term for supplements, also known as smart drugs, that improve brain function.

… Read the rest

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Scientists Reconstruct Images From Peoples’ Minds

By on February 4, 2012 in News 0

hearingBen Coxworth writing for Gizmag (thanks to Geoff H for the tip):

Last September, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley announced that they had developed a method of visually reconstructing images from peoples’ minds, by analyzing their brain activity.

Much to the dismay of tinfoil hat-wearers everywhere, researchers from that same institution have now developed a somewhat similar system, that is able to reconstruct words that people have heard spoken to them. Instead of being used to violate our civil rights, however, the technology could instead allow the vocally-disabled to “speak.”

Epilepsy patients were enlisted for the study, who were already getting arrays of electrodes placed on the surface of their brains to identify the source of their seizures. The scientists used these electrodes to monitor the electrical activity in a region of their brains’ auditory system, known as the superior temporal gyrus (STG). From there, it was a matter of observing the specific activity patterns that occurred when the subjects heard certain words.

… Read the rest

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