Lifeboat Foundation

The neurons, located in the brain are interconnected in a complex pattern and establish special communication points, the synapses. All neurons require a constant environment in order to function reliably. To ensure this, the brain is surrounded by the so-called blood-brain barrier. It ensures, for example, that the nutrient balance always remains the same and that harmful influences do not reach the neurons. This applies to all animals including humans. For insects, a team led by Nicole Pogodalla and Prof. Dr. Christian Klämbt from the Institute of Neuro-and Behavioral Biology at the University of Münster (Germany) has now shown that there is also a second barrier in the brain. Here glial cells, too, ensure a spatial separation of different functional compartments, which is essential for reliable functioning of the nervous system. The work was published in the prestigious online journal Nature Communications.

The research team studied the insect brain using larvae of the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) as an example and focused on the role of glial cells. Early in development these cells help to establish the correct neuronal network and later glial cells play important roles in controlling the transmission of signals between neurons. In all invertebrates, as well as in primitive vertebrates, glial cells also define the outer boundary of the nervous system – the blood-brain barrier.

Deep in the fly brain, all synapses are located in a special region called the neuropil. The neuropil is separated from the zone containing the cell bodies of the neurons by a small set of surrounding glial cells, that were in the focus of Nicole Pogodalla. She developed a new experimental approach — dye injections into living larval brains — and combined this with cell type specific ablation experiments to show that these glial cells actually form a diffusion barrier, i. e. regulate the distribution of molecules.

I think intelligent tool making life is rare but there is plenty of room for those far, far in advance of us. Robert Bradbury, who thought up M-Brains, said he did not think truly hyper advanced entities would bother communicating with us. Being able to process the entire history of human thought in a few millionths of a second puts them further away from us than we are from nematodes. But then that might not be giving them credit for their intelligence and resources, as they might wish to see how well their simulations have done compared to reality.

Foresight Intelligent Cooperation Group.

Continue reading “Anders Sandberg | Game Theory of Cooperating w. Extraterrestrial Intelligence & Future Civilizations” »

Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer by Robert Epstein + BIO.

It’s one of the most fascinating aspects of the natural world: shapes repeat over and over. The branches of a tree extending into the sky look much the same as blood vessels extending through a human lung, if upside-down. The largest mammal, the whale, is a scaled-up version of the smallest, the shrew. Recent research even suggests the structure of the human brain resembles that of the entire universe. It’s everywhere you look, really. Nature reuses its most successful shapes.

Theoretical physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico is concerned with fundamental questions in physics, and there are few more fundamental than this one: why does nature continually reuse the same non-linear shapes and structures from the smallest scale to the very largest? In a new Big Think video (see above), West explains that the scaling laws at work are nothing less than “the generic universal mathematical and physical properties of the multiple networks that make an organism viable and allow it to develop and grow.”

Continue reading “Could a pill that lowers our body temperature make us live longer?” »

Studying The Atoms Of Perception, Memory, Behavior and Consciousness — Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. — Chief Scientist, MindScope Program, Allen Institute.

Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. (https://alleninstitute.org/what-we-do/brain-science/about/te…stof-koch/) is Chief Scientist of the MindScope Program at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, originally funded by a donation of more than $500 million from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen.

Continue reading “Dr. Christof Koch, Ph.D. — Chief Scientist, MindScope Program — Allen Institute for Brain Science” »

Circa 2015 what if we didn’t need computers we only needed our minds upgraded? Quantum cognition talks about a theory of an upgraded mind.

What type of probability theory best describes the way humans make judgments under uncertainty and decisions under conflict? Although rational models of cognition have become prominent and have achieved much success, they adhere to the laws of classical probability theory despite the fact that human reasoning does not always conform to these laws. For this reason we have seen the recent emergence of models based on an alternative probabilistic framework drawn from quantum theory. These quantum models show promise in addressing cognitive phenomena that have proven recalcitrant to modeling by means of classical probability theory. This review compares and contrasts probabilistic models based on Bayesian or classical versus quantum principles, and highlights the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

Last year, scientists inferentially detected the existence of 2D visual mental representations that fundamentally change vision science. “The question becomes, what are they exactly? Are they patterns of neurons firing? Are they some kind of phenomenon not necessarily reducible to any kind of physical substrate?” Asks Jessica M. Wilson, philosopher and author of the book Metaphysical Emergence.

Coming up, scientists and philosophers spanning three countries weigh in on an experiment to discover the material nature of consciousness and the content of our experiences.

Let’s start with a definition: Consciousness is awareness. It’s the qualitative experience of that awareness — what it’s like to be something.

Simple sponges contain cells that appear to send signals to digestive chambers, a communication system that offer hints about how brains evolved.

It’s awe-inspiring to realize that there is a complex intelligence in every living cell. Two questions arise: Is it the intelligence of the cell? That seems inconsistent with how we usually use the word “intelligence.” If we see that a one-celled life form functions with lot of intelligence, perhaps it is more like a book that contains great ideas. Paper doesn’t create ideas; neither, by itself, does protoplasm. Something else is at work.

If the cell itself does not create the intelligence it embodies, what does? Panpsychists argue that all of nature participates in some way in consciousness and humans are the most highly developed example. Theists argue that only a mind outside the universe could create something like human consciousness.

As we learn more and more about the intricate complexities of nature, perhaps debates over the origin of life, intelligence, consciousness, and similar topics will increasingly be between panpsychists and theists rather than materialists and theists. A whole new environment.