Tag: Neuroscience
-
Slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence
Levin doesn’t believe this should be incendiary in any way. “If you think brains and neurons are special, you have to ask yourself: ‘How did they get here?’” he said. In the yawning span of time before evolution produced the first neuron, cells found other ways to navigate their environment, “doing pretty much the same…
-
Inflammation Keeps Us Alive. It’s Also Making Us Sick. – The New York Times
Another obstacle, until recently, was a longstanding belief that the immune systems of the brain and body were separate. Anatomically speaking, there didn’t appear to be any lymph vessels in the brain to allow communication with the immune system. Then, in 2015, Jonathan Kipnis and his colleagues found a network of tubes hidden in the…
-
Astronauts ‘observer’ sensation — the feeling of watching their own lives from a half-step outside the frame, ‘jet-lag of the self’
Crew members talk about feeling slightly delayed in conversations. They report a doubled awareness — being present while also watching themselves be present. Some say it feels like the first week of a new job that never quite ends. Others compare it to jet lag of the self. NASA’s own post-flight reflections from station crews…
-
What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings | Dogs | The Guardian
The holy grail of dog training is focus, whereby the dog stares unerringly at their handler, waiting for instruction, regardless of distractions around them. The websites and YouTube videos of celebrity trainers feature images of smiling men and women sitting casually at picnic tables or standing in high streets while a seemingly hypnotised doberman or…
-
What happens to your memories when your entire brain turns to liquid soup?
inside the chrysalis, a caterpillar’s brain completely dissolves and rebuilds from scratch to become a butterfly. Yet, tests show the butterfly still retains the memories it learned as a caterpillar. If a mind can survive its physical hardware being liquefied and entirely remolded, memory is clearly doing more than just sitting on a neural “hard…
-
How dementia is being defeated
whereas 40 years ago three in every ten Americans aged 85-89 had dementia, by 2024 just one in ten had it (see chart 1). What is more, America is not the only beneficiary of this trend. Between 1988 and 2015 the share of older people being diagnosed with dementia fell by 13% a decade across…
-
Why The Best Player Alive Barely Runs – Chunking
They’re chunking positions of people and angles of legs and spins of balls in order to understand immediately what’s going on and what might happen next. The more patterns you absorb in any domain, the less effort it takes to read what’s happening and to predict what’s coming next. So when Messi walks, he’s not…
-
No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious – The Atlantic
Experiencing an emotion such as desperation is inseparable from having stress hormones such as cortisol and epinephrine flood one’s body. Similarly, having a conscience means feeling sadness or moral repulsion at the idea of taking a certain action, and those emotions entail a physiological response, a remnant of having once felt sick with guilt after…
-
Who is good at soccer? – Marginal REVOLUTION
we found that elite players have exceptional cognitive abilities, including improved planning, memory, and decision-making skills. They also possess personality traits like high conscientiousness and openness to experience, along with reduced neuroticism. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/01/who-is-good-at-soccer.html