Published articles

Network structure influences the strength of learned neural representations

2025-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

New thermometry method reveals that compressing a gas may lead to cooling

2024-02-15T16:01:04+00:00

An international research team from Innsbruck and Geneva has developed a new thermometry method to measure temperatures for low-dimensional quantum gases. With this method it was found that compressing a gas may lead to cooling. The results on this counterintuitive phenomenon have just been published in Science Advances.

Wasps that recognize faces cooperate more, may be smarter - ScienceBlog.com

2023-12-23T04:07:58+00:00

A new study of paper wasps suggests social interactions may make animals smarter. The research offers behavioral evidence of an evolutionary link between the ability to recognize individuals and social cooperation.

The recessive genes that make a carrot orange

2023-09-28T15:00:06+00:00

A new study of the genetic blueprints of more than 600 types of carrot shows that three specific genes are required to give carrots an orange color. Surprisingly, these three required genes all need to be recessive, or turned off. The paper's findings shed light on the traits important to carrot improvement efforts and could lead to better health benefits from the vegetable.

‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power | Science | The Guardian

2023-07-09T02:10:36+00:00

Life: Modern physics can't explain it—but our new theory, which says time is fundamental, might

2023-04-10T11:00:45+00:00

Over the short span of just 300 years, since the invention of modern physics, we have gained a deeper understanding of how our universe works on both small and large scales. Yet, physics is still very young and when it comes to using it to explain life, physicists struggle. Even today, we can't really explain what the difference is between a living lump of matter and a dead one. But my colleagues and I are creating a new physics of life that might soon provide answers. More than 150 years ago, Darwin poignantly noted the dichotomy between what we understand in physics and what we observe in life—noting at the end of The Origin of Species "…whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.

How Our Native Language Shapes Our Brain Wiring

2023-03-17T20:41:55+00:00

Our native language may affect the way in which our brains are wired and underlie the way we think, a new study reports. Using neuroimaging to analyze neural connectivity in native German and native Arabic speakers, researchers found stronger connectivity between the right and left hemispheres in Arabic speakers, and stronger connectivity in the left hemisphere language area in German speakers.

Researchers Record Long-Term Electrical Activity in a Single Brain Cell - Neuroscience News

2023-02-23T11:05:41+00:00

Consciousness is learning: predictive processing systems that learn by binding may perceive themselves as conscious. (arXiv:2301.07016v2 [q-bio.NC] UPDATED)

2023-04-19T12:50:19+00:00

Machine learning algorithms have achieved superhuman performance in specific complex domains. Yet learning online from few examples and efficiently generalizing across domains remains elusive. In humans such learning proceeds via declarative memory formation and is closely associated with consciousness. Predictive processing has been advanced as a principled Bayesian inference framework for understanding the cortex as implementing deep generative perceptual models for both sensory data and action control. However, predictive processing offers little direct insight into fast compositional learning or the mystery of consciousness. Here we propose that through implementing online learning by hierarchical binding of unpredicted inferences, a predictive processing system may flexibly generalize in novel situations by forming working memories for perceptions and actions from single examples, which can become short- and long-term declarative memories retrievable by associative recall. We argue that the contents of such working memories are unified yet differentiated, can be maintained by selective attention and are consistent with observations of masking, postdictive perceptual integration, and other paradigm cases of consciousness research. We describe how the brain could have evolved to use perceptual value prediction for reinforcement learning of complex action policies simultaneously implementing multiple survival and reproduction strategies. 'Conscious experience' is how such a learning system perceptually represents its own functioning, suggesting an answer to the meta problem of consciousness. Our proposal naturally unifies feature binding, recurrent processing, and predictive processing with global workspace, and, to a lesser extent, the higher order theories of consciousness.

Nightly sleep is key to student success

2023-02-14T01:10:29+00:00

A multi-institutional team of researchers conducted the first study to evaluate how the duration of nightly sleep early in the semester affects first year college students end-of-semester grade point average (GPA). Using Fitbit sleep trackers, they found that students on average sleep 6.5 hours a night, but negative outcomes accumulate when students received less than six hours of sleep a night. The results are available in the Feb. 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Brain expert: The No. 1 thing that sets 'SuperAgers' apart from people with 'weak memory skills'

2022-11-26T10:27:22+00:00

There is a group of people that longevity researchers call “SuperAgers,” who are in their 80s and beyond, but have the cognitive function of those decades younger. Conversely, it’s possible for your brain to be older than your chronological age, which is what we want to avoid. As a neuroscience researcher and author of “The Age-Proof Brain,” I’ve found that it’s our behaviors, not just our genes, that have a powerful impact on our brain’s destiny. So what sets SuperAgers apart from people who have weak memory skills? According to a 2021 study that followed SuperAgers over the course of 18 months, one key differentiator was that they kept learning new things throughout their life.

Human brain cells in a dish learn to play Pong in real time -- ScienceDaily

2022-10-13T01:52:24+00:00

Human and mouse neurons in a dish learned to play the video game Pong, researchers report. The experiments are evidence that even brain cells in a dish can exhibit inherent intelligence, modifying their behavior over time.

Scientists Break the Direction of Time Down to the Cellular Level in Mind-Bending Study

2022-09-01T02:42:19+00:00

The passage of time is a universal facet of life. But what is time, and why do we experience it as something that has direction, with a past and a future? In a new study, scientists have broken down this "arrow of time" to a microscopic physical level.

Efficient dendritic learning as an alternative to synaptic plasticity hypothesis | Scientific Reports

2022-05-06T01:52:43+00:00

Synaptic plasticity is a long-lasting core hypothesis of brain learning that suggests local adaptation between two connecting neurons and forms the foundation of machine learning. The main complexity of synaptic plasticity is that synapses and dendrites connect neurons in series and existing experiments cannot pinpoint the significant imprinted adaptation location. We showed efficient backpropagation and Hebbian learning on dendritic trees, inspired by experimental-based evidence, for sub-dendritic adaptation and its nonlinear amplification. It has proven to achieve success rates approaching unity for handwritten digits recognition, indicating realization of deep learning even by a single dendrite or neuron. Additionally, dendritic amplification practically generates an exponential number of input crosses, higher-order interactions, with the number of inputs, which enhance success rates. However, direct implementation of a large number of the cross weights and their exhaustive manipulation independently is beyond existing and anticipated computational power. Hence, a new type of nonlinear adaptive dendritic hardware for imitating dendritic learning and estimating the computational capability of the brain must be built.

How mosquito brains encode human odor so they can seek us out

2022-05-04T17:08:29+00:00

Some strains of Aedes aegypti -- the mosquito that carries Zika, malaria and dengue fever -- have evolved to bite humans almost exclusively. A team has now discovered how they target us so precisely.

JupyterLite — JupyterLite 0.1.0-beta.4 documentation

2022-04-14T14:57:54+00:00

Molecules Produced by Gut Bacteria Could Help The Human Body Fight Cancer

2021-07-14T07:28:03+00:00

Our guts are fabulous places, filled with a myriad of microbes. These tiny life forms help us with everything from fermenting fiber to feeling full. But their effects don't stay just in the gut. We know that gut microbes like bacteria and yeast have a role to play in diabetes, depression and neurovascular disease. Now, scientists have discovered that molecules produced by stomach bacteria could give the human body a helping hand when it comes to the immune system, even going so far as to help fight tumors.

Physics - Statistical Mechanics Built on Sand

2021-06-29T06:43:57+00:00

Babies Can See Things That Adults Cannot

2021-06-25T18:09:37+00:00

Study reveals very young infants can perceive objects that older infants, children, and adults can not see due to a phenomenon called visual backward masking.

Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries | Quanta Magazine

2021-05-14T05:50:48+00:00

t a sleep research symposium in January 2020, Janna Lendner presented findings that hint at a way to look at people’s brain activity for signs of the boundary between wakefulness and unconsciousness. For patients who are comatose or under anesthesia, it can be all-important that physicians make that distinction correctly. Doing so is trickier than it might sound, however, because when someone is in the dreaming state of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, their brain produces the same familiar, smoothly oscillating brain waves as when they are awake.

Cleaning up the filesystem

2021-03-29T17:08:57+00:00

Researcher Proposes New Theory of Consciousness

2020-10-22T10:53:52+00:00

A 'consciousness conductor' synchronizes and connects mouse brain areas - Neuroscience News

2020-05-12T12:00:19+00:00

Mouse study reveals slow-wave brain activity, which is indicative of sleep and resting states, is controlled by the claustrum. The synchronization of active and silent states across the brain via the slow waves contributes to consciousness.

Dark matter theory: Information has mass, says physicist - Big Think

2020-02-03T13:17:48+00:00

Scientists Have Connected The Brains of 3 People, Enabling Them to Share Thoughts

2018-10-07T05:47:01+00:00

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it's as weird as it sounds.

DeepMind’s AI can ‘imagine’ a world based on a single picture

2018-06-14T19:00:00+00:00

A neural network has taught itself to ‘imagine’ a scene from different viewpoints, including how shadows move and textures vary, based on just a single image

Memory Transferred between Snails, Challenging Standard Theory of How the Brain Remembers - Scientific American

2018-05-21T05:04:34+00:00

UCLA neuroscientists reported Monday that they have transferred a memory from one animal to another via injections of RNA, a startling result that challenges the widely held view of where and how memories are stored in the brain.

Physicists read Maxwell's Demon's mind

2017-07-05T04:00:00+00:00

Pioneering research offers a fascinating view into the inner workings of the mind of 'Maxwell's Demon', a famous thought experiment in physics.

Feds unveil rule requiring cars to ‘talk’ to each other | TheHill

2016-12-14T06:44:30+00:00

The Obama administration released a long-awaited rule on Tuesday requiring all new vehicles to have communication technology that allows them to “talk” to each another, which officials say could prevent tens of thousands of crashes each year. The proposal calls for all new light-duty cars and trucks to eventually be equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) technology, a safety system that enables cars to send wireless signals to each other, anticipate each other’s moves and thus avoid crashes.

Complex learning dismantles barriers in the brain

2016-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Scientists at the Jagiellonian University in Poland taught Braille to sighted individuals and found that learning such a complex tactile task activates the visual cortex, when you'd only expect it to activate the tactile one.

Has DeepMind Really Passed Go? — Backchannel — Medium

2016-02-01T08:48:15+00:00

In the very same week that Artificial Intelligence lost one of its greatest pioneers, Marvin Minsky, it saw major progress on a decades-old challenge of playing human-level Go. There is much to shout about, but also a lot of hype and confusion about what we just saw. With so much at stake as people try to handicap the future of AI, and what it means for the future of employment and possibly even the human race, it’s important to understand what was and was not yet accomplished.

Dogs Have A Conscience Too

2015-12-09T04:42:02+00:00

That man’s best friend has a conscience is what every owner would be willing to bet, without even thinking about it for a moment. This means that dogs have self-consciousness. But the problem in science is that ideas and assumptions must be demonstrated. It is not enough for someone to have an inkling of something for it to be considered a scientific fact. Self-awareness, or self-consciousness, has been studied mainly by examining the responses of animals and children to their reflection in the mirror. The ultimate proof of possession of a consciousness of self, of one’s body and one’s own identity, is evaluated based on the individual’s ability to use his own reflection to notice and touch a mark (usually a red dot) applied under anaesthesia or during a period of distraction on the face, head, or other parts of the body. This test is known as the “mirror test” and many have observed experiments with children or chimpanzees that easily identify themselves in the mirror and repeatedly touch the mark placed by the investigator on their body.

The Information Theory of Life | Quanta Magazine

2015-11-20T06:14:38+00:00

The polymath Christoph Adami is investigating life’s origins by reimagining living things as self-perpetuating information strings.

The Right Way to Learn While You Sleep | Neuroscience News

2015-10-29T01:34:45+00:00

You can swot up on vocabulary in your sleep – but only if you don’t confuse your brain in the process. Researchers funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation have invited people to their sleep lab for a Dutch language course.

Mental maps: Route-learning changes brain tissue

2015-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

Fifteen years ago, a study showed that the brains of London cab drivers had an enlargement in the hippocampus, a brain area associated with navigation. But questions remained: Did the experience of navigating London's complex system of streets change their brains, or did only the people with larger hippocampi succeed in becoming cab drivers? Now, Carnegie Mellon University scientists have determined that learning detailed navigation information causes the hippocampal brain changes. The findings establish a critical link between structural and functional brain alteration.

Researchers find the organization of the human brain to be nearly ideal | news @ Northeastern

2015-07-07T15:14:54+00:00

A First Big Step Toward Mapping the Human Brain | WIRED

2015-05-16T15:29:50+00:00

It’s a long, hard road to understanding the human brain, and one of the first milestones in that journey is building a … database.

Why movies look weird at 48fps, and games are better at 60fps, and the uncanny valley… | Accidental Scientist

2014-12-25T00:42:53+00:00

It should be safe to conclude that humans can see frame rates greater than 24 fps. The next question is: why do movies at 48 fps look "video-y," and why do movies at 24 fps look "dreamy" and "cinematic." Why are games more realistic at 60 fps than 30 fps? Simon Cooke from Microsoft (Xbox) Advanced Technology Group has an interesting theory to explain this all. Your eyes oscillate a tiny amount, ranging from 70 to 103 Hz (on average 83.68 Hz). So here's the hypothesis: The ocular microtremors wiggle the retina, allowing it to sample at approximately 2x the resolution of the sensors. Showing someone pictures that vary at less than half the rate of the oscillation means we're no longer receiving a signal that changes fast enough to allow the supersampling operation to happen. So we're throwing away a lot of perceived-motion data, and a lot of detail as well. Some of the detail can be restored with temporal antialiasing and simulating real noise, but ideally Cooke suggests going with a high enough frame rate (over 43 fps) and if possible, a high resolution.

Distinguishing cause from effect using observational data: methods and benchmarks

2014-12-20T03:23:08+00:00

The discovery of causal relationships from purely observational data is a fundamental problem in science. The most elementary form of such a causal discovery problem is to decide whether X causes Y or, alternatively, Y causes X, given joint observations of two variables X, Y . This was often considered to be impossible. Nevertheless, several approaches for addressing this bivariate causal discovery problem were proposed recently. In this paper, we present the benchmark data set CauseEffectPairs that consists of 88 different "cause-effect pairs" selected from 31 datasets from various domains. We evaluated the performance of several bivariate causal discovery methods on these real-world benchmark data and on artificially simulated data. Our empirical results provide evidence that additive-noise methods are indeed able to distinguish cause from effect using only purely observational data. In addition, we prove consistency of the additive-noise method proposed by Hoyer et al. (2009).

Decreased segregation of brain systems across the healthy adult lifespan

2014-12-07T16:23:28+00:00

The brain is a large-scale network, not unlike many social or technological networks. Just like social networks, brain networks contain subnetworks or systems of highly related or interacting nodes (in the case of brains, nodes may represent neurons or brain areas). Using functional MRI to measure functional correlations between brain areas during periods of rest, we describe differences in brain network organization in a large group of individuals sampled across the healthy adult lifespan (20–89 y). We characterize a measure of system segregation, reflecting the degree to which the systems share connections among one another. Increasing age is accompanied by decreasing segregation of brain systems. Importantly, system segregation is predictive of measures of long-term memory function, independent of age.

1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity

2014-10-22T08:12:35+00:00

the neuroscience of consciousness

2014-10-13T00:06:16+00:00

Consciousness has traditionally been a philosophical question due largely to a lack of information regarding the specific details of brain function and how they correlate to the everyday experience in general. With models and techniques from experimental neurobiology and paradigms from the complexity and information sciences, neuroscientists have begun to produce empirical results that should inform any philosophical speculation.

Antidepressants rapidly alter brain architecture, study finds - LA Times

2014-09-22T00:34:26+00:00

A single dose of a popular class of psychiatric drug used to treat depression can alter the brain’s architecture within hours, even though most patients usually don’t report improvement for weeks, a new study suggests.

Pigeon paradox reveals quantum cosmic connections

2014-07-30T17:00:00+00:00

A thought experiment has exposed a new kind of quantum link that could connect every particle in the universe, all the time

Using rhythmic brain activity to track memories in progress

2014-06-24T01:12:48+00:00

Using electroencephalogram (EEG) electrodes attached to the scalps of 25 student subjects, a UO team led by psychology doctoral student David E. Anderson captured synchronized neural activity while they held a held a simple oriented bar located within a circle in short-term memory. The team, by monitoring these alpha rhythms, was able to decode the precise angle of the bar the subjects were locking onto and use that brain activity to predict which individuals could store memories with the highest quality or precision.

Clever Suppression in the Brain

2014-06-15T16:01:45+00:00

Diversity of inhibiting nerve cells allows for more complex information processing: The hippocampus is a small structure in the brains of mammals that plays a crucial role in processing input from our senses and allows perceptions to be stored as memories. Nerve cells that inhibit the activity of other cells have now been shown to play a much larger and more complex role in these processes than previously assumed.

U-M tinnitus discovery opens door to possible new treatment avenues

2014-06-14T14:40:01+00:00

Disruption of timing from sensory nerves underlies "ringing in the ears" that plagues millions, including many veterans.

Maxwell’s Refrigerator, Powered by Information

2014-06-07T01:29:57+00:00

A proposed device can act like Maxwell’s famous demon and as a tiny refrigerator “powered” by the entropy contained in information, rather than by an external source of energy.

Sleep's memory role discovered

2014-06-07T01:22:07+00:00

The mechanism by which a good night's sleep improves learning and memory has been discovered by scientists.