notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #211

Kids are born seemingly healthy, start developing normally, and then, because they're missing a single enzyme, a sugar molecule called heparan sulfate builds up in their brains. They lose the words they've learned, then the ability to walk. The median life expectancy of those inflicted is 15.

themarginalian.org

The Building Blocks of Personhood: Oliver Sacks on Neurocognitive Pillar of What Makes Us Who We Are

We have, each of us, a life-story, an inner narrative — whose continuity, whose sense, is our lives. It might be said that each of us constructs and lives, a "narrative," and that this narrative is us, our identities. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives — we are each of us unique.

notboring.co

Weekly Dose of Optimism #207

These results establish attention as a cognitive mechanism capable of regulating immune function in vivo. Situated within predictive and allostatic models of brain–body control, our results reframe perception as biologically consequential rather than merely experiential.

themarginalian.org

Polyvagal Theory and the Neurobiology of Connection: The Science of Rupture, Repair, and Reciprocity

Although they stopped explicitly looking and found ways to navigate on their own, their autonomic nervous system never stopped needing, and longing for, co-regulation. Because we are physiologies first and psychologies second, but we are also storytelling and sensemaking creatures, our minds naturally create emotional narratives out of these unconscious vagal states — stories that, if we are not careful enough and conscious enough, may come to subsume reality.

themarginalian.org

The Healing Power of Gardens: Oliver Sacks on the Psychological and Physiological Consolations of Nature

A man with Tourette's syndrome, afflicted by severe verbal and gestural tics in the urban environment, grows completely symptom-free while hiking in the desert; an elderly woman with Parkinson's disease, who often finds herself frozen elsewhere, can not only easily initiate movement in the garden but takes to climbing up and down the rocks unaided; several people with advanced dementia and Alzheimer's disease, who can't recall how to perform basic operations of civilization like tying their shoes, suddenly know exactly what to do when handed seedlings and placed before a flower bed.

lennysnewsletter.com

The new inner game: Your unfair advantage in the age of AI

You've probably been told that better choices come from more data or sharper reasoning, but neuroscience shows us that our choices are fundamentally emotional. Our feelings are the underlying 'context-setters' on which our rational brain acts. When we avoid certain emotional states, our solution set becomes constrained in ways we may not even be aware of.

upstartsmedia.com

Using Living Brain Cells To Train AI, With TBC's Alex Ksendzovsky

"I think the pie in the sky, the North Star is real-time biological computing, where we're actually plugging biological networks or neurons into data centers for real-time inference, for things like intuition, for a personalized AI that's constantly learning, just like the brain does."

themarginalian.org

Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Recomposes the Brain

Because human beings remember with neurons, we are disposed to see more of what we have already seen, hear anew what we have heard most often, think just what we have always thought. Our minds are burdened by an informational inertia whose headlong course is not easy to slow… No individual can think his way around his own Attractors, since they are embedded in the structure of thought.

longreads.com

You Must Remember This

"It's scientifically interesting for me," he said. "You know, two brothers, and both writers. So similar, yet so different. It's quite interesting."

themarginalian.org

The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

Contrary to the standard belief that our senses are a kind of passive window onto the world, what is emerging is a picture of an ever-active brain that is always striving to predict what the world might currently have to offer. Those predictions then structure and shape the whole of human experience, from the way we interpret a person's facial expression, to our feelings of pain, to our plans for an outing to the cinema.

3quarksdaily.com

Scientists Grow Electronics Inside the Brains of Living Mice

Blood proteins churn the injected chemicals into a soft, flexible electrode mesh that seamlessly wraps around delicate neurons. Pulses of light aimed at the mesh quiet hyperactive cells.

themarginalian.org

What Birds Dream About: How Evolution Invented REM in the Avian Brain So We May Practice the Possible in Our Sleep

It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. It may be that we evolved to dream ourselves into reality — a laboratory of consciousness that began in the bird brain.

asteriskmag.com

The Sweet Lesson of Neuroscience

Scientists once hoped that studying the brain would teach us how to build AI. Now, one AI researcher may have something to teach us about the brain.