Lifeboat Foundation

Cannot wait to hear Mckenna’s perspective on BMIs for brain connection to all things digital, and microbots used to extend life as well as bionic body parts.

Famed psychonaut Terence Mckenna envisioned a very radical approach of bridging psychedelics with virtual reality to create a supercharged version of consciousness in which language, or rather the meaning behind what we speak, could be made visual in front of our very eyes.

In Mckenna’s “cyberdelic” future of virtual reality, artists and the revival of art, would be at the forefront of innovation, according to a talk he gave to a German audience in 1991.

Continue reading “Terence Mckenna’s ‘cyberdelic’ predictions for Virtual Reality 25 years on” »

Here is a concept; “could VR be used to rehabilitate criminals to experience through VR what their victims have experienced?” I do know in the recent 20 yrs a part of rehabilitation has included the criminal facing their victims so that the criminal develops a new level of empathy. However, could VR be a better solution? And, should it be?

LONDON, Feb. 15 (UPI) — Depression patients who interacted with characters in a virtual reality environment were less critical and more compassionate toward themselves, researchers found in a small study in England.

Researchers at University College London found some of the self-directed negativity of people feel in depression can be mitigated through role-playing in virtual reality.

Continue reading “Virtual reality treatment helps depression patients in study” »

People may soon use virtual reality to treat their depression and to be less critical and more compassionate towards themselves, a new study shows. A new virtual reality therapy has effectively reduced depressive symptoms of patients with some reporting significant drop in depression severity.

In the study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry Open, patients claim virtual reality therapy changed their response to real-life situations in which they would previously have been self-critical.

The findings come from the analysis of the effect of the therapy to 15 depression patients, aged 23 to 61. Researchers, from University College London (UCL) and ICREA-University of Barcelona, asked the participants to wear a virtual reality headset to see from the perspective of a life-size “avatar” or virtual body.

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Very interesting since many complex neural diseases also have ties to the brain stem such as Dystonia.

Feb. 22, 2016 — There is a new ground zero for Alzheimer’s Disease, according to a new discovery of a critical but vulnerable region in the brain that appears to be the first place affected by late onset Alzheimer’s disease. It also may be more important for maintaining cognitive function in later life than previously appreciated.

The locus coeruleus is a small, bluish part of the brainstem that releases norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter responsible for regulating heart rate, attention, memory, and cognition. Its cells, or neurons, send branch-like axons throughout much of the brain and help regulate blood vessel activity, says a new review of the scientific literature.

Continue reading “Ground Zero for Alzheimer’s Disease found at base of brainstem” »

Albert Einstein wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in secret. But that’s not how history played out.

I knew it! Now, we have proof; FB is addicting like cocaine.

Facebook impacts the brain in a similar way to cocaine, gambling and other substance and compulsive addictions, says a new study.

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On the heels of the MindMaze round of $100 million, it is clear that Swiss tech is booming and beginning to tickle the curiosity of international investors.

The startup had already closed an angel funding round of $10 million and recently announced the opening of their Series A round at a $1 billion valuation. The lead investor is multinational conglomerate Hinduja Group, with participation from family offices that haven’t been disclosed yet.

MindMaze is a neuro-rehabilitation platform that helps stroke victims to recover faster by “fooling” the brain through VR/AR technology.

Continue reading “Swiss Startups Delving Into Virtual Reality” »

Good news for chocolate lovers: eating the sweet treat has been found to have a positive association with cognitive performance, according to a new study.

Published in the journal Appetite, researchers used data collected from a Maine-Syracuse Longitudinal Study (MSLS), in which 968 people aged between 23 and 98 were measured for dietary intake and cardiovascular risk factors, as well as cognitive function.

The researchers found that regularly eating chocolate was significantly associated with cognitive function “irrespective of other dietary habits”.

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Whether in the brain or in code, neural networks are shaping up to be one of the most critical areas of research in both neuroscience and computer science. An increasing amount of attention, funding, and development has been pushed toward technologies that mimic the brain in both hardware and software to create more efficient, high performance systems capable of advanced, fast learning.

One aspect of all the efforts toward more scalable, efficient, and practical neural networks and deep learning frameworks we have been tracking here at The Next Platform is how such systems might be implemented in research and enterprise over the next ten years. One of the missing elements, at least based on the conversations that make their way into various pieces here, for such eventual end users is reducing the complexity of the training process for neural networks to make them more practically useful–and without all of the computational overhead and specialized systems training requires now. Crucial then, is a whittling down of how neural networks are trained and implemented. And not surprisingly, the key answers lie in the brain, and specifically, functions in the brain and how it “trains” its own network that are still not completely understood, even by top neuroscientists.

In many senses, neural networks, cognitive hardware and software, and advances in new chip architectures are shaping up to be the next important platform. But there are still some fundamental gaps in knowledge about our own brains versus what has been developed in software to mimic them that are holding research at bay. Accordingly, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) in the U.S. is getting behind an effort spearheaded by Tai Sing Lee, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and researchers at Johns Hopkins University, among others, to make new connections between the brain’s neural function and how those same processes might map to neural networks and other computational frameworks. The project called the Machine Intelligence from Cortical Networks (MICRONS).

Continue reading “IARPA Project Targets Hidden Algorithms of the Brain” »