Only 2% of Alzheimer’s is 100% genetic. The rest is up to your daily habits.
Up Next ► 4 ways to hack your memory https://youtu.be/SCsztDMGP7o.
Continue reading “5 ways to build an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain | Lisa Genova” »
In 2008, Dr. Eben Alexander contracted a rare case of bacterial meningitis. As the pathogen wracked his brain, causing it to swell and suffuse with pus, Alexander entered a deep coma. He was not expected to survive. But live he did, and with a tale to tell. For in Alexander’s stricken state, he underwent a near-death experience, a profound out-of-body event. Four years later, the neurosurgeon detailed it in a best-selling book.
“I had no real center of consciousness,” he wrote. “I didn’t know who or what I was or even if I was simply… there, a singular awareness in the midst of a soupy, dark, muddy nothingness…”
More recently, Alexander’s popular account of his near-death experience attracted the attention of Pascal Michael, a PhD student in psychology at the University of Greenwich. Michael met Alexander after seeing him speak at an academic conference and was informed that Alexander had experimented with 5-MeO-DMT, a psychedelic closely related to DMT, secreted from the glands of the Colorado River toad.
The amygdala can hijack your brain’s response if it recognizes past trauma in a current situation. To regain control, simply press pause. Big Think.
DBS delivers electric currents to an electrode implanted in the brain.
Neurotechnology – or – while still an emerging industry, has attracted both major capital investments, and extensive media coverage in recent years. As tech relentlessly searches for the next “big tech platform” in the aftermath of the smartphone era [1], we propose that the answer may lie within our own minds. At NTX Services, we definenology as any technological intervention that interacts with the brain or central nervous system either directly or indirectly, and as attempts to integrate human and machine to enhance both, applications of the technology are broad ranging.
Often described as a new field, is actually based on decades of academic research, previously held back from commercialization at scale due to technological limitations, and slow changes in government policies and regulations. Although humans have been researching the brain and its bioelectrical signals since the 1600s [2], the first major breakthrough in was the invention of the electroencephalogram (EEG) by Hans Berger in 1929 [3]. Since this initial invention, several key developments have influenced the evolution of the industry until 2016, when Neuralink was founded [4].
It is increasingly clear that memories are distributed across multiple brain areas. Such “engram complexes” are important features of memory formation and consolidation. Here, we test the hypothesis that engram complexes are formed in part by bioelectric fields that sculpt and guide the neural activity and tie together the areas that participate in engram complexes. Like the conductor of an orchestra, the fields influence each musician or neuron and orchestrate the output, the symphony. Our results use the theory of synergetics, machine learning, and data from a spatial delayed saccade task and provide evidence for in vivo ephaptic coupling in memory representations.
Bryan Johnson is the world’s most famous biohacker – and perhaps the “most measured man in human history”. He’s on a mission to maximally reverse the quantified biological age of each of his 70 organs, extending his lifespan and healthspan, and then roll out his protocol on a platform to ensure others can benefit from his experience, research and experimentation.
Johnson’s ethos can be summed up pretty neatly as don’t die, and to that end, he has written a book, or novel, to be more accurate, entitled Don’t Die, the uncorrected advanced reading version of which is downloadable as a free ebook from his website. Johnson’s nom de plume for this venture is Zero, described in the book as the “first individual H. sapiens to surpass five hundred years of age,” who dies in 2,478 (in an accident, rather than from old age), just weeks away from “becoming Homo Deus.” Johnson credits Zero with the invention of Zeroism and the resurrection technology undie, as well as the fathering of “millions of biological and digital offspring who now live in the far reaches of the solar system and beyond”
Longevity. Technology: Because Don’t Die is a novel, Johnson can explore his philosophy in a different way, inviting us to observe the narrator, Scribe, on his last day on Earth, as he muses on humanity’s future evolution, the nature of death and free will and the impact of age reversal and programmable biology. Scribe is joined by a Pilgrim’s Progress-like cast of characters, including Cognitive Bias, Dark Humor and Game Play and Self Critical.
A first-of-its-kind flexible sensor turns a pair of earbuds into a device capable of recording brain activity and analyzing sweat, making them useful for diagnosing diseases and health monitoring.
The background: Health monitoring wearables can measure our blood pressure, track our heart rates, and even detect infections before we start to feel sick, helping us take better care of ourselves and potentially even giving us a way to prevent the spread of diseases.
The devices are useless if no one wants to wear them, though, so finding designs that are comfortable and easy to integrate into daily life is key. Because earbuds are already popular, researchers have used them as the basis for health monitoring devices that record brain activity to predict strokes, epileptic seizures, or Parkinson’s disease.
Epilepsy is a neurological condition that causes people to have recurring seizures. Epileptic seizures may be mild and barely noticeable or stronger ones, causing severe muscle spasms or loss of consciousness. These may last a few seconds or several minutes. Anyone can develop epilepsy at any point in their life.
face_with_colon_three Year 2017
Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow. In this video, Kurzweil suggests the blueprint for the master algorithm—or a single, general purpose learning algorithm—is hidden in the brain.
The brain, according to Kurzweil, consists of repeating modules that self-organize into hierarchies that build simple patterns into complex concepts. We don’t have a complete understanding of how this process works yet, but Kurzweil believes that as we study the brain more and reverse engineer what we find, we’ll learn to write the master algorithm.
Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil: Our Brain Is a Blueprint for the Master Algorithm” »
