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Category: neuroscience

Becoming Immortal through Mind Uploading sounds like something that’ll only be possible around the 2100’s. But amazingly, a group of scientists at Nectome are working on giving us the ability to live forever inside of a computer simulation by the end of this decade for around 10000$.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, has long predicted that people will be able to upload their entire brains to computers and become digitally immortal by 2045. Kurzweil made this claim for many years, e.g. during his speech in 2013 at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York, which claims to subscribe to a similar set of beliefs. Mind uploading has also been advocated by a number of researchers in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, such as the late Marvin Minsky.
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TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 The Future is near.
01:46 How this procedure works.
03:31 The development of this technology.
04:24 Is this actually possible to achieve?
06:58 The ethical concerns.
07:40 Last Words.
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#longevity #minduploading #bci

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Japanese startup Diver-X is looking to launch a SteamVR-compatible headset that seems to be taking a few ideas from popular anime Sword Art Online, which prominently features a fully immersive metaverse. While it’s not a brain-computer interface like the “full dive” NerveGear featured in the show, the heavy-weight hardware presents a pretty interesting approach to VR headset design.

Called HalfDive, the Tokyo-based company says its taking advantage of the sleeping position to “enabl[e] human activity in its lowest energetic state.”

Since it’s worn laying down, the creators say they’re freed from many of the design constraints that conventional VR headset makers are used to pursuing with the introduction of things like pancake optics and microdisplays. Since the weight isn’t on your neck, it doesn’t have to be light or slim.

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Neuroscience biweekly vol. 45 27th October — 10th November.

The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, a team of neuroscientists has discovered. Its findings indicate that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual because the brain has a mechanism that does not detect that the language has switched, allowing for a seamless transition in comprehending more than one language at once.

“Our brains are capable of engaging in multiple languages,” explains Sarah Phillips, a New York University doctoral candidate and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal eNeuro. “Languages may differ in what sounds they use and how they organize words to form sentences. However, all languages involve the process of combining words to express complex thoughts.”

“Bilinguals show a fascinating version of this process — their brains readily combine words from different languages together, much like when combining words from the same language,” adds Liina Pylkkänen, a professor in NYU’s Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper.

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Human neurons have fewer ion channels, which might have allowed the human brain to divert energy to other neural processes.

Neurons communicate with each other via electrical impulses, which are produced by ion channels that control the flow of ions such as potassium and sodium. In a surprising new finding, MIT neuroscientists have shown that human neurons have a much smaller number of these channels than expected, compared to the neurons of other mammals.

The researchers hypothesize that this reduction in channel density may have helped the human brain evolve to operate more efficiently, allowing it to divert resources to other energy-intensive processes that are required to perform complex cognitive tasks.

“If the brain can save energy by reducing the density of ion channels, it can spend that energy on other neuronal or circuit processes,” says Mark Harnett, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.

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A CNS 2021 provided an incredible opportunity to learn more how the anatomy and integrity of brain networks impact higher-level cognition.

In the 19th and 20th century, cases of individuals with brain injury, such as Phineas Gage or Henry Molaison, have advanced our understanding of the relationship between the anatomy of the brain and its function. Back then, methods were limited to investigate whole-brain structure and function. Now, cognitive neuroscientists have some ability to visualize and measure activity of the whole brain at once, as well as the computational tools to investigate complex network-level relationships between brain structure, brain function, and behavior.

As a doctoral student working on stroke recovery, attending the CNS 2021 symposium led by Danielle Bassett was an incredible opportunity to learn more about some of the most recent methods that have been developed to understand how the anatomy and integrity of brain networks impact higher-level cognition. Strokes highly disrupt anatomical and functional connectivity, leading to cognitive and motor impairments. In individuals with post-stroke language impairments, namely aphasia, evidence shows that the more functional brain networks recover an organization similar to healthy individuals the better the recovery (Kiran et al., 2019). Understanding the relationship between brain structure and function in health and disease is therefore essential to develop appropriate treatments.

At this CNS symposium, the speakers showed how different models can help us better understand brain structural organization and how this particular organization constrains cognitive processes. They also showed direct relationships between alteration of anatomical networks, caused by disease or behavioral training, and changes in behavioral performance.

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The human genome can be thought of as a massive library, containing over 20,000 different “instruction manuals”: your genes. For example, there are genes which contain information to build a brain cell, a skin cell, a white blood cell, and so on. There are even genes that contain information about regulating the genome itself—like books that explain how to organize a library. The ability to regulate gene expression —in other words, the cell’s ability to turn various constellations of genes on or off—is the basis of why different cells (such as a muscle cell or a brain cell) have different forms and functions.

For any library to be useful to a reader, it needs to be organized in an easily searchable way. For example, all the books pertaining to world history may be on one shelf, whereas the cookbooks may be in an entirely different section of the library. In a cellular nucleus, there is over six feet of genetic material packed into a space 50 times smaller than the width of a human hair. How is the “library” in the nucleus organized? When a cell needs to regulate certain genes, how does the cellular machinery find the right ones amongst 20,000 others?

A new paper from the laboratory of Mitchell Guttman, professor of biology, uses a powerful new tool that can peer into the world of the cell’s genetic material (DNA.

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This video gives and overview of human neuroscience and applies it to the design of an artificial general intelligence named Eta.

Go to www.startengine.com/orbai to own shares in the future of AI.
Check out https://www.orbai.ai/about-us.htm for details on the company, tech, patents, products and more.

What we usually think of as Artificial Intelligence today, when we see human-like robots and holograms in our fiction, talking and acting like real people and having human-level or even superhuman intelligence and capabilities — is actually called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and it does NOT exist anywhere on earth yet. What we do have is called Deep Learning, that has fundamental limitations that will not allow it to become AGI.

For an AI to pass the threshold of human intelligence, and become an artificial general intelligence requires an AI to have the ability to see, hear, and experience its environment. It needs to be able to learn that environment, to organize it’s memory non-locally and store abstract concepts in a distributed architecture so it can model it’s environment, events, and people in it.

It needs to be able speak conversationally and interact verbally like a human, and be able to understand the experiences, events, and concepts behind the words and sentences of language so it can compose language at a human level.

It needs to be able to solve all the problems that a human can, using flexible memory recall, analogy, metaphor, imagination, intuition, logic and deduction from sparse information.

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The Neuro-Network.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘽𝙧𝙖𝙞𝙣 𝘾𝙖𝙣 𝙍𝙚𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙡 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙍𝙚𝙖𝙬𝙖𝙠𝙚𝙣 𝙋𝙖𝙨𝙩 𝙄𝙢𝙢𝙪𝙣𝙚 𝙍𝙚𝙨𝙥𝙤𝙣𝙨𝙚𝙨

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐨𝐧𝐥𝐲 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩𝐬 𝐭𝐨 𝐫𝐞𝐠𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐢𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐬 “𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬” 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐦.… See more.

The brain not only helps to regulate immune responses, but also stores and retrieves “memories” of them.

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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.

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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.

2021 program & apply to join: https://foresight.org/intelligent-cooperation/

Anders Sandberg, Oxford University.

Game Theory of Cooperating with Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Future Civilizations.

Anders Sandberg’s research at the Future of Humanity Institute centres on management of low-probability high-impact risks, estimating the capabilities of future technologies, and very long-range futures. Anders is a Senior Research Fellow on the ERC UnPrEDICT Programme. Topics of particular interest include global catastrophic risk, cognitive biases, cognitive enhancement, collective intelligence, neuroethics, and public policy. He is research associate to the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He is on the advisory boards of a number of organisations and often debates science and ethics in international media. Anders has a background in computer science, neuroscience and medical engineering. He obtained his Ph.D. in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, Sweden, for work on neural network modelling of human memory.

JOIN VISION WEEKEND 2021 (US & France, Dec 2021)

Where: Starting at the Internet Archive, a rocket company, and ship in San Francisco on Dec 4 & 5 culminating at a laboratory for the future disguised as a stunning castle outside of Paris on Dec 11 & 12.

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