Browsed by
Category: biology

Promising metabolic therapy for dementias

Promising metabolic therapy for dementias

Comments 0 Comment

An article describes a personalized therapeutic program involving 10 patients and using multiple modalities for metabolic enhancement for neurodegeneration (MEND). The first 10 patients who have utilized this program include patients with memory loss associated with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), or subjective cognitive impairment (SCI). Nine of the 10 displayed subjective or objective improvement in cognition beginning within 3-6 months, with the one failure being a patient with very late stage AD. Six of the patients…

Read More Read More

Cognitive decline as early as 18 years prior to clinical diagnosis of dementia

Cognitive decline as early as 18 years prior to clinical diagnosis of dementia

Comments 0 Comment

Performance on individual cognitive tests of episodic memory, executive function, and global cognition also significantly predicted the development of AD dementia, with associations exhibiting a similar trend over 18 years. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that cognitive impairment may manifest in the preclinical phase of AD dementia substantially earlier than previously established. http://www.neurology.org/content/85/10/898 (paywall site)

Neuroscience of Empathy

Neuroscience of Empathy

Comments 1 comment

(This is copied from the Meetup site. Thanks again to Brent for hosting.) Details Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes and understand how they feel- to be them, even for a second. It’s the link between self and others: how we connect, heal, and relate. Considering its importance in every aspect of our lives, we are taking a deeper look at the neuroscience behind empathy. Recommended Preparation Info. The Neuroscience of Empathy | Article |…

Read More Read More

Are We Racists?

Are We Racists?

Comments 6 comments

BMAI friends. The following ramble is my first cut at making sense of the grave role racial (and other) bias is playing in the world today. This was prompted by comments I see daily from my family and friends on social media. Thinking about the great lack of self- and group-awareness many of the commenters display, I turned my scope inward. How do my own innate, evolved biases slant me to take my group’s and my own privileges for granted and…

Read More Read More

Daniel Dennett on the evolution of the mind

Daniel Dennett on the evolution of the mind

Comments 2 comments

The Google talk on his new book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds. The blurb: “How did we come to have minds? For centuries, this question has intrigued psychologists, physicists, poets, and philosophers, who have wondered how the human mind developed its unrivaled ability to create, imagine, and explain. Disciples of Darwin have long aspired to explain how consciousness, language, and culture could have appeared through natural selection, blazing promising trails that tend, however, to end…

Read More Read More

Future discussion topic recommendations

Future discussion topic recommendations

Comments 2 comments

Several of us met on Labor Day with the goal of identifying topics for at least five future monthly meetings. (Thanks, Dave N, for hosting!) Being the overachievers we are, we pushed beyond the goal. Following are the resulting topics, which will each have its own article on this site where we can begin organizing references for the discussion: sex-related influences on emotional memory gross and subtle brain differences (e.g., “walls of the third ventricle – sexual nuclei”) “Are there…

Read More Read More

Mathematical field of topology reveals importance of ‘holes in brain’

Mathematical field of topology reveals importance of ‘holes in brain’

Comments 2 comments

New Scientist article: Applying the mathematical field of topology to brain science suggests gaps in densely connected brain regions serve essential cognitive functions. Newly discovered densely connected neural groups are characterized by a gap in the center, with one edge of the ring (cycle) being very thin. It’s speculated that this architecture evolved to enable the brain to better time and sequence the integration of information from different functional areas into a coherent pattern. Aspects of the findings appear to…

Read More Read More

Please recommend sources on the evolution of political impulses and thinking

Please recommend sources on the evolution of political impulses and thinking

Comments 0 Comment

In preparation for the March meeting topic, Your Political Brain, please recommend any resources you have found particularly enlightening about why humans evolved political thinking. Also, please share references about how brain functions lead to political perceptions. I’m assuming political perceptions result from more fundamental cognitive orientations, and that those arise in part from one’s genetics and in part from environment (during development and afterward). Let’s use the following description from Wikipedia: Politics is the process of making decisions applying…

Read More Read More

15 Nov 16 Discussion on Transhumanism

15 Nov 16 Discussion on Transhumanism

Comments 0 Comment

Good discussion that covered a lot of ground. I took away that none of us have signed on to be early adopters of brain augmentations, but some expect development of body and brain augmentations to continue and accelerate. We also considered the idea of bio-engineered and medical paths to significant life-span, health, and cognitive capacity improvements. I appreciated the ethical and value questions (Why pursue any of this? What would/must one give up to become transhuman? Will the health and…

Read More Read More

Meaningful Transhumanism (H+)…

Meaningful Transhumanism (H+)…

Comments 2 comments

All bodily capacities, including the most impressive, uniquely human cognitive and metacognitive ones, coevolve with regulatory mechanisms. Regulatory mechanisms operate unconsciously, and control the expression of associated capacities such that the latter consistently operate with high effectiveness and efficiency to promote replication of our genes. So, to fundamentally change and render socioecologically sustainable the human species, H+ technologies will somehow have to alter the deep neural relationship between these regulatory “value systems,” (sensu neuroscientist Gerald Edelman in, “A Universe of…

Read More Read More