Lifeboat Foundation

Aristotle is frequently regarded as one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity. So why didn’t he think much of his brain?

In this brief history of the brain, the GPA explores what the great minds of the past thought about thought. And we discover that questions that seem to have obvious answers today were anything but self-evident for the individuals that first tackled them. And that conversely, sometimes the facts which we simply accept to be true can be blinding, preventing us from making deeper discoveries about our our world and ourselves.

“For the experiment, pairs of people played the well-known question-and-answer game “20 Questions”, but were located in two rooms a mile apart and hooked up to a brain-reading system. The person answering “yes” or “no” was connected to an ECG machine, which records electrical brain activity. The person guessing had a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil behind their head — a non-invasive tool that stimulates small areas of the brain”

Two human brains have successfully played “20 Questions”, showing for the first time that it is possible for two brains to share thoughts.

Continue reading “Hooked-up human brains play telepathic ‘20 Questions’” »

The best GIFs are on Giphy.

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A sequel to Steven Spielberg’s epic movie, MINORITY REPORT is set in Washington, D.C., 10 years after the demise of Precrime, a law enforcement agency tasked with identifying and eliminating criminals … before their crimes were committed. Now, in 2065, crime-solving is different, and justice leans more on sophisticated and trusted technology than on the instincts of the precogs. Sept. 21 series premiere Mondays 9/8:00c

LIMITLESS, based on the feature film, is a fast-paced drama about Brian Finch, who discovers the brain-boosting power of the mysterious drug NZT and is coerced by the FBI into using his extraordinary cognitive abilities to solve complex cases for them. Sept. 22 series premiere Tuesdays 10/9c

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Entertainment/New Media | Human Enhancement | VR/Augmented Reality/Computer Graphics.

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By Dharmendra S. Modha, Ph. D., IBM Research

Building a computer that could match the power of the human brain has long been a goal of scientists.

Continue reading “IBM Smarter PlanetVoice: Meet The Brain-Inspired Computer Chip That Can Smell, Feel And Hear” »

For centuries, religious texts have explored the idea that reality breaks down once we get past our surface perceptions of it; and yet, it is through these ambiguities that we understand more about ourselves and our world. In the Old Testament, the embattled Job pleads with God for an explanation as to why he has endured so much suffering. God then quizzically replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). The question seems nonsensical — why would God ask a person in his creation where he was when God himself created the world? But this paradox is little different from the one in Einstein’s famous challenge to Heisenberg’s “Uncertainty Principle”: “God does not play dice with the universe.” As Stephen Hawking counters, “Even God is bound by the uncertainty principle” because if all outcomes were deterministic then God would not be God. His being the universe’s “inveterate gambler” is the unpredictable certainty that creates him.

The mind then, according to quantum cognition, “gambles” with our “uncertain” reason, feelings, and biases to produce competing thoughts, ideas, and opinions. Then we synthesize those competing options to relate to our relatively “certain” realities. By examining our minds at a quantum level, we change them, and by changing them, we change the reality that shapes them.

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Autopilot is a good start.

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Up until now, you can only navigate Google Glass by touching or talking to it, but London-based firm This Place just made it possible to control the device using something else: your brainwaves. The company just released an open source application called MindRDR that gives you something akin to very, very limited telekinetic abilities — so long as you have both Google Glass and Neurosky’s EEG biosensor headset. See, MindRDR serves as the bridge that connects the two, translating the brain activity from the EEG biosensor into executable commands for the high-tech eyewear. At the moment, the software can only take pictures and upload them to either Facebook or Twitter, but This Place released the app for free on GitHub in hopes that other developers will use it for more advanced projects.

MindRDR shows up as a thin white line on Glass’s screen, which moves upwards the more the user concentrates. Once that line reaches the very top, it snaps a picture of whatever you want — you simply need to repeat the process to upload the image to a social network. In the future, though, its creators believe that the app could be a huge help to people who can’t move on their own. These include quadriplegics, those with multiple sclerosis, and especially those suffering from locked-in syndrome.

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The dimensionless aspect, since it has no dimensions, is outside of space and time. This is the key aspect to existence: an aspect outside of space and time perpetually interacting dialectically with an aspect inside space and time. All of the weird and wonderful phenomena of the universe are the products of this ultimate dichotomy.

http://youtu.be/MbRda_sCgkQ

Does this sound crazy? Then consider the evidence provided by black holes.

The R = 0 Universe.

Continue reading “The dimensional aspect of existence is associated with the dimensions of space and time.” »