Further evidence that we inhabit a cosmic fractal

Ego City: Cities organized like human brains

"Natural selection has passively guided the evolution of mammalian brains throughout time, just as politicians and entrepreneurs have indirectly shaped the organization of cities large and small," said Mark Changizi, a neurobiology expert and assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer, who led the study. "It seems both of these invisible hands have arrived at a similar conclusion: brains and cities, as they grow larger, have to be similarly densely interconnected to function optimally."

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The semantic apocalypse

Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse

What if our memories, experience, thoughts and worldview are all just a side effect of our brain's evolution? What if human consciousness as we know it is something we'll eventually evolve out of? What if we are essentially just a strange dream cooked up by a piece of meat that drives our bodies on a genetic mission to reproduce?

The day that scientific knowledge blots out human meaning -- that's the semantic apocalypse.

Image by Chris Butler.


Could sentience be a passing evolutionary phase? If so, what comes next? Elsewhere, I've wondered if the strange behavior exhibited by UFO occupants might reflect a post-sentient mode of being:

If we're dealing with aliens -- regardless whether or not they originate in space or on Earth -- maybe their clumsy, oblique interactions with us can be explained if they're endowed with intelligence but devoid of sentience. They could have taken an evolutionary route that bypassed awareness entirely, or they could have achieved a form of sentience only to lose it, perhaps by recklessly merging with their machines.

In hindsight, I suppose I shouldn't have used the word "recklessly." After all, we're conditioned to accept self-awareness as an advantage because it's a fundamental aspect our our existence; just because it seems "natural" or consoling now doesn't mean it will last. If the future survival of life on Earth entails ultimately jettisoning consciousness, perhaps we should welcome the prospect -- regardless how "cold" or alien it might seem from our slender perspective as social primates.

Once again I'm drawn to the prospect that the "Grays" function as posthuman metaphors summoned forth from the collective unconscious, their clinical disposition underscoring our own postbiological trajectory.

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Wetware

Neuroscientists propose project to comprehensively map mammalian brain circuits

Mitra and his co-authors therefore advocate for "a concerted effort" to complete a first-draft circuit map of the entire mouse brain within two to three years, as a first step to mapping vertebrate brain architecture across species. The proposed project would ideally be pursued simultaneously by neuroscientists at multiple institutions according to standardized protocols. "In this respect," says Jason Bohland, Ph.D., a postdoctoral neuroscience researcher at CSHL and the paper's lead author, "it would be analogous to the multi-institution effort to sequence the human genome, with the important distinction that our brain-circuit map could be completed much more rapidly and would cost a small fraction of the genome project - as little as a few million dollars ranging up to perhaps $20 million, depending on the redundancy in coverage that we commit to."

Fusion

Honda develops brain interface for robot control

The system was not demonstrated on Tuesday but Honda did release a video of experiments. It shows a controller sitting in a chair with a large hemispheric scanner over his head, like the sit-down hair dryers you find in hair salons.

Both the EEG and NIRS techniques are established but the analyzing process for the data is new. Honda said the system uses statistical processing of the complex information to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion.

Just as compelling:

The next not-so-big thing: Nanogenerators

Such generators could be used to power sensors for detecting cancer or measuring blood sugar level for diabetics, Wang says. He adds that within five to 10 years, the technology will mature to the point that these generators could be placed in the soles of shoes or the fabric of clothes so that people will be able to power their iPods and cell phones using the mechanical energy created by the rustling of their clothes or compression of their shoe insoles as they walk.

Living on the edge

The human brain is on the edge of chaos

Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives "on the edge of chaos", at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

Spooky action at a distance

Human eye could detect spooky action at a distance

It's almost a year since Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva announced that they had calculated that a human eye ought to be able to detect entangled photons. "Entanglement in principle could be seen," they concluded.

That's extraordinary because it would mean that the humans involved in such an experiment would become entangled themselves, if only for an instant.

Scientists Model Words as Entangled Quantum States in our Minds

Research has shown that words are stored in our memories not as isolated entities but as part of a network of related words. This explains why seeing or hearing a word activates words related to it through prior experiences. In trying to understand these connections, scientists visualize a map of links among words called the mental lexicon that shows how words in a vocabulary are interconnected through other words.

However, it's not clear just how this word association network works. For instance, does word association spread like a wave through a fixed network, weakening with conceptual distance, as suggested by the "Spreading Activation" model? Or does a word activate every other associated word simultaneously, as suggested in a model called "Spooky Activation at a Distance"?

Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible

Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky's research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions -- but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

"A lot of the early work in this field was on conscious decision making, but most of the decisions you make aren't based on conscious reasoning," says Pouget. "You don't consciously decide to stop at a red light or steer around an obstacle in the road. Once we started looking at the decisions our brains make without our knowledge, we found that they almost always reach the right decision, given the information they had to work with."

See also:

Blind Man Sees With Subconscious Eye

TN has what is known as blind sight, according to de Gelder. Even though the primary part of his brain that processes visual information is destroyed, he still has more primitive parts of his brain intact, and these are capable of doing some visual processing. After all, one of the most basic functions of the visual system is to help an animal avoid obstacles or predators. TN still has some visual abilities -- he's just not aware he has them.

Oh, by the way, there's this book you should read . . .

Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain's Subconscious Visual Sense

Scientists have previously reported cases of blindsight in people with partial damage to their visual lobes. The new report is the first to show it in a person whose visual lobes -- one in each hemisphere, under the skull at the back of the head -- were completely destroyed. The finding suggests that people with similar injuries may be able to recover some crude visual sense with practice.

I rather suspect Peter Watts will weigh in on this shortly.

'Sex chip' will have us wired, Oxford University researcher Morten Kringelbach says

The wiring remains a hurdle: Dr Aziz says current technology, which requires surgery to connect a wire from a heart pacemaker into the brain, causes bleeding in some patients and is "intrusive and crude".

By 2015, he predicts, micro-computers in the brain with a range of applications could be self-powered and controlled by hand-held transmitters.

And just think of the iPhone applications!

Scientists extract images directly from brain

Pink Tentacle reports that researchers at Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed a system that can "reconstruct the images inside a person's mind and display them on a computer monitor."

This is incredibly exciting news. I'm reminded of the "Until the End of the World," a powerful science fiction film that anticipates a technology that can extract images from dreams.

Ultrasound shown to exert remote control of brain circuits

When asked about the potential of using his groups' methods to remotely control brain activity, Tyler says: "One might be able to envision potential applications ranging from medical interventions to use in video gaming or the creation of artificial memories along the lines of Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in 'Total Recall.' Imagine taking a vacation without actually going anywhere?"

(Via KurzweilAI.net.)

I can't help but wonder if a similar effect is to blame for the "screen memories" and "missing time" that plague UFO abductees. Many UFO sightings are accompanied by strange, low-frequency noises that could, in theory, alter consciousness -- perhaps merely as a side-effect.

Scientists Erase Specific Memories in Mice

Study co-author Joe Z. Tsien, co-director of the Brain & Behavior Discovery Institute at the Medical College of Georgia, Augusta, says the "work reveals a molecular mechanism of how [memory deletion] can be done quickly and without doing damage to brain cells."

Imagine "Total Recall" with the "dystopian" knob cranked up a few notches.

American lifestyle must change, says neuroscientist

According to neuroscientist Peter Whybrow, head honcho of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA the concept of the American Dream is a "biological impossibility."

Personally, I've always thought the much-vaunted "American Dream" is the stuff of nightmares.

Back from the grave

If human consciousness can really leave the body and operate without a brain then everything we know in neuroscience has to be questioned. If people could really gain paranormal knowledge then much of physics needs to be rewritten. This is what is at stake. Add to that the fact that most people in the population believe in some kind of life after death, and many desperately want it to be true, then you have a strong case for this research -- even if the chances of success are vanishingly small.

(Via Reality Carnival.)

Action-blindsight in healthy subjects after transcranial magnetic stimulation

Clinical cases of blindsight have shown that visually guided movements can be accomplished without conscious visual perception. Here, we show that blindsight can be induced in healthy subjects by using transcranial magnetic stimulation over the visual cortex. Transcranial magnetic stimulation blocked the conscious perception of a visual stimulus, but subjects still corrected an ongoing reaching movement in response to the stimulus. The data show that correction of reaching movements does not require conscious perception of a visual target stimulus, even in healthy people. Our results support previous results suggesting that an efference copy is involved in movement correction, and this mechanism seems to be consistent even for movement correction without perception.

(Via No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons.)

Pedophilia in a Pill (Peter Watts)

I would be willing to bet, though, that most people would not think more kindly of pedophiles after performing this thought experiment, and in fact most people would vilify and shout down anyone who dared to make excuses for these monsters. Anything to do with kids is, by definition, a motherhood issue; and motherhood issues by definition turn us into irrational idiots.

But our legal systems generally define culpability in terms of whether offenders know that their acts are against the law, and by that standard I guess some kind of punishment is called for. Still. Let's at least be consistent about it, shall we?

India's use of brain scans in courts dismays critics

The software tries to detect whether, when the crime's details are recited, the brain lights up in specific regions -- the areas that, according to the technology's inventors, show measurable changes when experiences are relived, their smells and sounds summoned back to consciousness. The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between peoples' memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed.

Theoretically, one could apply a very similar technique to gauge the veracity of alleged alien abductees. Confabulated memories, for example, could be revealed as such while memories of objectively real events could be vindicated in a laboratory setting. The implications for paranormal research shouldn't be understated.

Taxi drivers 'have brain sat-nav'

Earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus - a region of the brain that plays an important role in navigation.

Their brains even "grow on the job" as they build up detailed information needed to find their way around London's labyrinth of streets - information famously referred to as "The Knowledge".

(Via Boing Boing.)

Changing the way we think

Carr believes that the style of searching and exploration of links encouraged by search engines such as Google is changing the way heavy users think, reflecting that "over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going - so far as I can tell - but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think".

(Via Reality Carnival.)

A Plague of Angels (or, Rorschach in your living room!) (Peter Watts)

Yes, the technology will improve over time; yes, efficiency will increase. But we're still talking about an omnidirectional broadcast here; even if the bulk of the signal strength passes in one direction, there's still going to be at least some wasted energy going out along the whole 360.

More to the point though, is Smith's confident assertions that "the human body is not affected by magnetic fields". Maybe he's talking about a different model of human body. Maybe the model he's talking about comes with a Faraday cage built into the skull, and is not susceptible to the induction of religious rapture, selective blindness, or the impaired speech and memory effects that transcranial magnetic stimulation can provoke in our obsolete ol' baseline brains.