Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health have identified a protein in the visual system of mice that appears to be key for stabilizing the body’s circadian rhythms by buffering the brain’s response to light. The finding, published Dec. 5 in PLoS Biology, advances efforts to better treat sleep disorders and jet lag, the study authors say.

“If circadian rhythms adjusted to every rapid change in illumination, say an eclipse or a very dark and rainy day, they would not be very effective in regulating such periodic behaviors as sleep and hunger. The protein we identified helps wire the brain during neural development to allow for stable responses to circadian rhythm challenges from day to day,” says Alex Kolodkin, Ph.D., professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Neuroscience and deputy director for the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.

Kolodkin co-led the study with Samer Hattar, Ph.D., chief of the Section on Light and Circadian Rhythms at the National Institute of Mental Health.

The capacity to be creative, to produce new concepts, ideas, inventions, objects or art, is perhaps the most important attribute of the human brain. We know very little, however, about the nature of creativity or its neural basis. Some important questions include how should we define creativity? How is it related (or unrelated) to high intelligence? What psychological processes or environmental circumstance cause creative insights to occur? How is it related to conscious and unconscious processes? What is happening at the neural level during moments of creativity? How is it related to health or illness, and especially mental illness? This paper will review introspective accounts from highly creative individuals. These accounts suggest that unconscious processes play an important role in achieving creative insights. Neuroimaging studies of the brain during “REST” (random episodic silent thought, also referred to as the default state) suggest that the association cortices are the primary areas that are active during this state and that the brain is spontaneously reorganising and acting as a self-organising system. Neuroimaging studies also suggest that highly creative individuals have more intense activity in association cortices when performing tasks that challenge them to “make associations.” Studies of creative individuals also indicate that they have a higher rate of mental illness than a noncreative comparison group, as well as a higher rate of both creativity and mental illness in their first-degree relatives. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between the nature of the unconscious, the unconscious and the predisposition to both creativity and mental illness.

Keywords: Creativity, Complexity, Consciousness, Default mode, Functional imaging, Self-organising systems, The Unconscious, Resting state, REST

Creativity is one of our most valued human traits. It has given human beings the ability to change the world that they live in; and it has also, paradoxically, given them the ability to adapt to changes in the world over which they have no control. Our highly developed capacity to develop and implement new ideas arises from our highly developed human brain. Understanding how creative ideas arise from the brain is one of the most fascinating challenges of contemporary neuroscience.

Summary: Researchers identify a crucial protein, Tenm3, in mice’s visual system that stabilizes circadian rhythms by modulating the brain’s response to light. This discovery has significant implications for treating sleep disorders and jet lag.

Circadian rhythms play a vital role in regulating sleep, alertness, and other cyclic behaviors, and disruptions can lead to health problems.

By understanding Tenm3’s role, researchers aim to develop interventions for sleep disorders and jet lag, ultimately benefiting human health.

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent fasting leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.

Guest lecture by Joscha Bach on the past and future of language models.

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We imagine physics is objective. But quantum physics found the act of human observation changes the outcome of experiment. Many scientists assume this central role of the observer is limited to just quantum physics. But is this an error? As Heisenberg puts it, \.

Published 12 August 2020 • © 2020 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd Journal of Physics: Photonics, Volume 2, Number 4 Focus on Photonics for Neural Information Processing Citation Matěj Hejda et al 2020 J. Phys. Photonics 2 044001 DOI 10.1088/2515–7647/aba670

A central challenge for systems neuroscience and artificial intelligence is to understand how cognitive behaviors arise from large, highly interconnected networks of neurons. Digital simulation is linking cognitive behavior to neural activity to bridge this gap in our understanding at great expense in time and electricity. A hybrid analog-digital approach, whereby slow analog circuits, operating in parallel, emulate graded integration of synaptic currents by dendrites while a fast digital bus, operating serially, emulates all-or-none transmission of action potentials by axons, may improve simulation efficacy. Due to the latter’s serial operation, this approach has not scaled beyond millions of synaptic connections (per bus). This limit was broken by following design principles the neocortex uses to minimize its wiring. The resulting hybrid analog-digital platform, Neurogrid, scales to billions of synaptic connections, between up to a million neurons, and simulates cortical models in real-time using a few watts of electricity. Here, we demonstrate that Neurogrid simulates cortical models spanning five levels of experimental investigation: biophysical, dendritic, neuronal, columnar, and area. Bridging these five levels with Neurogrid revealed a novel way active dendrites could mediate top-down attention.

K.B. and N.N.O. are co-founders and equity owners of Femtosense Inc.

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