Lifeboat Foundation

Observing anything and everything within the human brain, no matter how large or small, while it is fully intact has been an out-of-reach dream of neuroscience for decades.

Three new innovations from an MIT-based team enables high-resolution, high-throughput imaging of human brain tissue at a full range of scales, and mapping connectivity of neurons at single-cell resolution.

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A collaboration of a neurologist, a computer scientist, and a philosopher has just put forward a new theory of consciousness. It is based on the idea of causal models. The authors claim boldly that their idea solves the hard problem of consciousness and explains why zombies don’t exist in nature. Really? I’ve had a look.

Continue reading “New Theory of Consciousness Explains Why Zombies Don’t Exist” »

We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally-selected, self-organising, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a mathematical formalism describing how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory information according to valence and specific needs. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies which can only be differentiated from each other by the qualitative aspect of information processing. Selection pressures favour systems that can intervene in the world to achieve homeostatic and reproductive goals. Quality is a property arising in such systems to link cause to affect to motivate real world interventions. This produces a range of qualitative classifiers (interoceptive and exteroceptive) that motivate specific actions and determine priorities and preferences.

Summary: Neural stem cells, which create new neurons in the brain, become less active with age due to elevated glucose levels. Researchers found that by knocking out the glucose transporter gene GLUT4 in older mice, they could significantly increase the production of new neurons.

This discovery opens up potential pathways for both genetic and behavioral interventions to stimulate brain repair, including the possibility of a low-carbohydrate diet. The findings could help treat neurodegenerative diseases and aid in brain recovery after injury.

Patients with certain mental disorders, including schizophrenia, often hear voices in the absence of sound.

Auditory hallucinations are likely the result of abnormalities in two brain processes: a broken corollary discharge that fails to suppress self-generated sounds, and a noisy efference copy that makes the brain hear these sounds more intensely than it should. That is the conclusion of a study published October 3 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Xing Tian, of New York University Shanghai, China, and colleagues.

In the new study, researchers carried out electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments measuring the brain waves of 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations and 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who had never experienced such hallucinations.

🧠 Neuromodulation through the eyes 👀

Neuroplasticity, also known as neural plasticity or brain plasticity, is a process that involves adaptive structural and functional changes to the brain.

Founded and directed by Deborah Zelinsky, O.D., F.N.O.R.A., F.C.O.V.D.

Continue reading “The Z-Bell℠ Test: A Breakthrough in Eye-Ear Testing” »

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Imagine trying to understand the brain’s activity over time—an incredibly complex and dynamic process that happens at different speeds.

To solve this problem, we developed a pipeline called UnitMatch, which operates after spike sorting. Before applying UnitMatch, the user spike sorts each recording independently using their preferred algorithm. UnitMatch then deploys a naive Bayes classifier on the units’ average waveform in each recording and tracks units across recordings, assigning a probability to each match.

Continue reading “Tracking neurons across days with high-density probes” »

With this success, Synchon is looking to take its experiments to the next level by adding more participants in a larger study. CEO Tom Oxley claims that their future study would focus more on ‘gathering brain data to improve the BCI.

Are Brain-Computer Interfaces the Future of Technology?

Different companies have already begun their developments and clinical trials of their brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) which need to be implanted on human test subjects, centering mostly on paraplegic patients. One of the most famous companies behind this is Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and their first patient, Noland Arbaugh, testified how the implant can help in controlling technology, and in his case, gaming.

A new study led by Stanford Medicine scientists found that certain changes in neural activity predicted which patients would benefit from a type of cognitive behavioral therapy.