Wildcat

"Surely there must have been times in high school or college when you laid in bed, late at night, and wondered where your “free will” came from? What part of the brain—if it is the brain—is responsible for deciding to act one way or another? One traditional answer is that this is not the job of the brain at all but rather of the soul. Hovering above the brain like Casper the Friendly Ghost, the soul freely perturbs the networks of the brain, thereby triggering the neural activity that will ultimately lead to behavior. Although such dualistic accounts are emotionally reassuring and intuitively satisfying, they break down as soon as one digs a bit deeper. How can this ghost, made out of some kind of metaphysical ectoplasm, influence brain matter without being detected? What sort of laws does Casper follow? Science has abandoned strong dualistic explanations in favor of natural accounts that assign causes and responsibility to specific actors and mechanisms that can be further studied. And so it is with the notion of the will." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

I thought this was pretty old news - didn't Penfield demonstrate this long time ago? - Jean-Claude Bradley

what takes an idea from inception to actualization & execution, the visualization & realization of that initial invisible spark? what keeps it in the realm of thought, of talk? what keeps it from reaching through to the visible and starting a fire? is is that we don't feel "ready"? don't feel we have the resources necessary to begin? Hope Floats by notthisbody "While idealistic architects, futurists, sociologists, philosophers - are in an endless search for creating the perfect island out of society, in a context totally foreign and segmented, there is a group of 15 people actually doing it. But its not just the creation of their world - but rather the connections they are gonna establish by sailing with the world that seems disconnected in a communication society. They are building a house on a boat - and its more than a house - its a multi purpose space - that lets you live on it, move with it, float with it and do service! Its a purposeful house. What an attempt...." the floating... - Wildcat

"USC/STANFORD—Merely observing someone publicly blame an individual in an organization for a problem—even when the target is innocent—greatly increases the odds that the practice of blaming others will spread, new research shows. The reason: Blame triggers the perception that one’s self-image is under assault and must be protected. Nathanael Fast, an assistant professor of management and organization at the USC Marshall School of Business and Larissa Tiedens, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University, conducted four experiments to investigate the viral nature of public blaming. The study is believed to be the first to examine whether shifting blame to others is socially contagious. The results will be published in the November issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “When we see others protecting their egos, we become defensive too,” says Fast, the study’s lead author. “We then try to protect our own self-image by blaming others for our mistakes, which... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

Blame creates a culture of fear,” Fast says, “and this leads to a host of negative consequences for individuals and for groups.” - Wildcat

The first decade of the 21st century is about to end in just a few weeks. Among many things, I find most impacting the explosion of knowledge in the field of brain sciences and human behavior in this decade. Though the great riddles of consciousness and the emergence of minds from brains are still open and far from any solution, many connections and bridges are already there in our understanding. Quite a few important and perhaps critical observations regarding human nature and the state of affairs of humanity are emerging from this explosion of knowledge and I will try to (very) briefly summarize them here below: 1. Our brains and our minds are initially products of biological evolution. Human behavior to this day is largely shaped by its biological origins. 2. In the course of just a few millennia, the human evolved language and culture. Culture has become the actual ecology where humans exist and where humans evolve. Human evolution as of today is not shaped by biological forces... - Wildcat

"18 November 2009—Scientists and engineers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center, in San Jose, Calif., announced today at the Supercomputing Conference (SC09) in Portland, Ore., that they have created the largest brain simulation to date on a supercomputer. The number of neurons and synapses in the simulation exceed those in a cat’s brain; previous simulations have reached only the level of mouse and rat brains. Experts predict that the simulation will have profound effects in two arenas: It will lead to a better understanding of how the brain’s architecture leads to cognition, and it should inspire the design of electronics that mimic the brain’s as-yet-unmatched ability to do complex computation and learn using a small volume of hardware that consumes little power. The cortical simulator, called C2, integrates research from the fields of computation, computer memory, communication, and neuroscience to re-create 1 billion neurons connected by 10 trillion individual synapses. C2 runs on... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

“Instead of banging our heads against Moore’s Law, why not build computers more like the brain and get them to solve problems the way the brain does?” Right now, Roadrunner, the supercomputer that comes closest to replicating a human’s ability to drive in rush-hour traffic, weighs 227 metric tons and requires a diet of about 3 megawatts. By contrast, the brain regularly handles... more... - Wildcat

How about this! -> "A major problem is power consumption. Dawn is one of the most powerful and power-efficient supercomputers in the world, but it takes 500 seconds for it to simulate 5 seconds of brain activity, and it consumes 1.4 MW. Extrapolating from today’s technology trends, IBM projects that the 2019 human-scale simulation, running in real time, would require a dedicated nuclear power plant." - Kurt Starnes

"Inching our reality ever closer to Star Trek's, scientists at the University of Maryland's Joint Quantum Institute successfully teleported data from one atom to another in a container a meter away. A landmark in the brain-bending field known as quantum information processing, the experiment doesn't quite have the cool factor of body transportation; one atom merely transforms the other so it acts just like the original. Still, atom-to-atom teleportation has major implications for creating super-secure, ultra-fast computers." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

voted for Teleportation as well - Cynthia

"Researchers have found compelling evidence that people who are more empathetic possess a particular variation of the oxytocin receptor gene. Published in the journal Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences, the findings by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, support other research showing that oxytocin plays a major role in countering stress. Previous studies have also linked this genetic variation with autism and parenting styles, says study coauthor Sarina Rodrigues, assistant professor of psychology at Oregon State University. All humans inherit a variation of this gene or “allele” from each parent. The study looked at the three combinations of gene variations of the oxytocin receptor. The most empathetic—able to get an accurate read on others’ emotions—had two copies of the “G allele.” In contrast, members of the AA and AG allele groups were found to be less capable of putting themselves in the shoes of others and more likely to get stressed out in... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"According to IBM, 'BlueMatter, a new algorithm created by IBM researchers in collaboration with Stanford University, exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture in order to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.' (Credit: IBM) Computers capable of mimicking the human brain's power and efficiency could be just 10 years off, according to a leading researcher at IBM. According to the researcher, Dharmendra Modha, the manager of IBM's cognitive computing initiative, scientists from his company and some of the world's most prestigious universities have already managed to simulate the computing complexity of the feline cortex, a feat that could augur a day not too far off when it will be possible... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"A researcher at the NASA Ames Center has developed a proof of concept device which can convert an iPhone into a chemical sensor capable of detecting ammonia, chlorine gas, and methane. The chem sniffing device is a small silicon chip (no bigger than a stamp) that plugs into the phone. Upon detection, the chip uses the phone to alert others. It was developed as part of Homeland Security’s Cell-All program. The US hopes that one day a small, inexpensive, and portable chip such as this one could be used to turn thousands (or millions) of mobile phones into a means of quickly detecting hazardous chemicals in public environments. That detection could save lives and help direct first response units. Of course, for the nerds out there the device’s true importance is easy to see: it’s the next step to developing a tricorder from Star Trek." - Wildcat from Bookmarklet