05.07.07
Random News Wrapup
Check out this article talking about using a selfish gene model to selectively breed insects. Their eventual goal is to create malaria-resistant mosquitos.
This article talks about how to wire your brain for religious transcendance. The article talks about modern methods of cranial stimulation, and then moves on to chemicals and traditional hallucinogens.
This article talks about the current trend of mind games (games that help exercise your mind). I’m sure most people have heard about Brainage. The article also talks about a brain training program by PositScience that is scientifically proven to help the mind.
In a recent PNAS paper, Merzenich’s lab announced that PositScience was able to reverse “age-related cognitive decline” in a randomized and controlled study of 182 subjects. Of those trained with PositScience, 93 percent showed significant cognitive improvement. “We’ve demonstrated that you can take the brain of a 75-year-old,” Merzenich says, “and make it function like the brain of a 35- or 40-year-old. It takes training, and some hard work, but it’s possible.” Preliminary results of a second trial study suggest that PositScience can even help stave off memory loss in the early stages of Alzheimer’s patients. After just four weeks, senile patients showed significant cognitive improvement. The control group, on the other hand, continued to decline.
Also this article enumerates 17 criteria for consciousness. Its a bit technical to read. Here are my two favorites:
Property 1: “Irregular” patterns of brain activity
Electrical oscillations occuring between 20 and 70 times per second are common in awake humans, but epilepsy, sleep, anesthesia and some forms of brain damage are accompanied by the dominance of highly regular oscillations slower than 4 Hz. Others have argued that the conscious EEG is characterized by a particular noise signature known as “pink” or “1/f” noise. Although the purpose of these peculiar electrical oscillations is poorly understood, they appear to be a consistent feature of primate consciousness.
Property 6: Present-centeredness
Seth et al. argue that consciousness is centered on the present, probably for evolutionary reasons, and that this present-centeredness may arise from the fact that the dynamic core of neural activity is in constant flux.
The second one seems very zen-like to me.