Gentle People:
Here we are in 2018 and I can't believe how many people do not have a basic knowledge of science!
With magnificent discoveries occuring every day we should be doing a great deal more to understand what is happening! Why the ignorance? We have landed people on the Moon and we have sent robot vehicles with cameras to Mars! We are working with Atoms and Sub-Atomic particles and our computers are one step away from walking and talking by themselves without a need for us to program them. In fact computers may reprogram us in the near future with DNA editing. What is that you may ask...I suggest you visit the Singularity Hub site to discover and learn some marvelous secrets but remember these words from Dr. Divya Chander :
“One of our biggest ethical problems is: all of this technology that’s hacking the neural code can non-invasively read brainwaves in a way we’ve never been able to do before,” “There’s a group at the University of Alabama that actually found that if you’re wearing an EEG cap and someone’s typing in a password, you can hack the password. Using optogenetics we can implant false memories into mice.”
At the end of the interview Chander highlighted both the positive and cautionary power of technology, and said it’s up to us to direct its course.
“I like to remind everybody that this technology has the power to transform humanity in the most beautiful way possible, but we have to remember there are going to be certain things we need to consider, like the ramifications of this technology on a global scale.”
Happy Holidays and may 2018 bring us all some wonderful surprises.
Individual insight into brain networks Harvard scientists have gained new insights into how the brain networks important for thought and remembering are organized in individual people, bringing the notion of using brain scans to help personalize medical treatments one step closer to reality.
Led by Randy Buckner, a Professor of Psychology and of Neuroscience, and Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, and Rodrigo Braga, a post-doctoral fellow in Buckner’s lab, researchers identified two networks that lie side-by-side in the brain and may play key roles in planning, remembering and imagination. The networks are described in a July 19 paper published in Neuron.
“We’ve known for some time there is a network of brain regions that is involved in memory,” Braga said. “What we’ve done is look at the organization of this network in more detail than ever before by diving deeply into individuals as opposed to looking across groups of - sometimes - thousands of individuals…and by doing so we’ve been able to see a new level of detail.”
To understand this network, Braga and Buckner used MRI to intensively scan the brains of four individuals two dozen times over the course of several months.
What those scans revealed, they said, is that instead of one network there are actually two networks sitting side-by-side in numerous areas of the brain. The networks are, in fact, so intertwined that in some regions, one network is literally surrounded by the other.
Though the newly-discovered networks first appeared to be close copies of one another, closer examination reveals one key difference - one network is connected to memory structures while the other isn’t. The similarities suggest both might have originated in similar processes occurring during brain development and evolution. That critical difference, meanwhile, hints at how evolution has specialized the networks for different aspects of thought.
Source:
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/hu-iii071917.phpJournal article:
http://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(17)30562-7#neuroscience #brainnetwork #research #memory #hippocampus #defaultmodenetwork #braincircuitry
The original "Information Super Highway" :)
