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New research provides evidence that the active ingredient in so-called magic mushrooms can affect brain processes related to emotional functioning long after the substance has left one’s body. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, shed new light on the long-term effects of psilocybin.

Rather than examining the brain while it’s under the influence of psilocybin, the researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine were interested in the enduring impact of the substance.

“Nearly all psychedelic imaging studies have been conducted during acute effects of psychedelic drugs. While acute effects of psychedelics on the brain are of course incredibly interesting, the enduring effects of psychedelic drugs on brain function have great untapped value in helping us to understand more about the brain, affect, and the treatment of psychiatric disorders,” said Frederick S. Barrett (@FredBarrettPhD), an assistant professor and the corresponding author of the study.

That vision may have come a step closer after researchers at the University of California, San Francisco demonstrated that they could translate brain signals into complete sentences with error rates as low as three percent, which is below the threshold for professional speech transcription.

While we’ve been able to decode parts of speech from brain signals for around a decade, so far most of the solutions have been a long way from consistently translating intelligible sentences. Last year, researchers used a novel approach that achieved some of the best results so far by using brain signals to animate a simulated vocal tract, but only 70 percent of the words were intelligible.

The key to the improved performance achieved by the authors of the new paper in Nature Neuroscience was their realization that there were strong parallels between translating brain signals to text and machine translation between languages using neural networks, which is now highly accurate for many languages.

Research involving bowhead whales has suggested that it may one day be possible to extend the human lifespan to 200 years.

From the demigods of Greek mythology to the superheroes of 20th century comic books, we’ve been intrigued by the idea of human enhancement for quite a while, but we’ve also worried about negative consequences. Both in the Greek myths and modern comics and television, each enhanced human has been flawed in some way.

Continue reading “Creating Superman (and woman): Who benefits from human enhancement?” »

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Continue reading “Make Aging History! /Bioviva Ceo Elizabeth Parrish 207. Debt Nation” »

The implications of split-brain research have been widely debated. Scientists and philosophers have long argued over what is known as the mind-body quandary, the relationship between our mind and the physical brain. Some scientists saw the work of Sperry and others as supporting the notion that the brain operates almost entirely mechanically, and that consciousness, reasoning and free will have almost no effect. But Sperry strongly felt otherwise…

What this meant to Sperry was that free will, and responsibility, were no illusion. “It is possible to see today,” he believed, “an objective, explanatory model of brain function that neither contradicts nor degrades but rather affirms age-old humanist values, ideals, and meaning in human endeavor.”

It’s fair to say that the true significance of the split-brain experiments goes far beyond the significance of the lateralization of the brain; it also points to the immaterial nature of the mind.

The human cerebral cortex is important for cognition, and it is of interest to see how genetic variants affect its structure. Grasby et al. combined genetic data with brain magnetic resonance imaging from more than 50,000 people to generate a genome-wide analysis of how human genetic variation influences human cortical surface area and thickness. From this analysis, they identified variants associated with cortical structure, some of which affect signaling and gene expression. They observed overlap between genetic loci affecting cortical structure, brain development, and neuropsychiatric disease, and the correlation between these phenotypes is of interest for further study.

Science, this issue p. eaay6690.

A recent study published in JAMA Neurology identifies certain neurological hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease in the brains of older adults with sleep apnea.

Studies of hibernating animals suggest that the molecular and synaptic integrity of neurons in the cerebral cortex that underlie self and consciousness is maintained in many cases when from the outside the brain appears dead.

A striking feature of medicine over the past few centuries has been our growing ability to bring people back from the “dead.” For most of human history, patients who were unconscious and not breathing were treated as though they had died. But the concept of resuscitation emerged as doctors grew to understand the basic function of the lungs and airways. That led to new techniques and tools capable of restoring both breathing and heartbeat — and the realization that cardiac arrest was not always a death sentence. That, in turn, gave rise to a distinction between what’s now called clinical death versus brain death.

Continue reading “‘Rebooting the brain’: Our fight to bring people back from the dead” »

Brain implants are neural implants that are used to stimulate the parts & structures of the nervous system. These implants are technical systems that communicate with the nervous system and help to enhance senses, physical movement, and memory after a stroke or other head injuries. Deep brain stimulation and spinal cord stimulation are used to treat depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and epilepsy, among other neural disorders.

Technology has touched all aspects of our lives in this 21st century world that we live in and has, in fact, become an integral part of our lives. So much so that we start feeling incomplete as soon as we manage to get away from it.

No doubt, it has enhanced our lives in many different ways and today we can do things that we couldn’t have even imagined a few decades ago. I mean, sending a text to someone half way around the world in an instant? Almost feels like magic, doesn’t it?