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 Post subject: Chinas Scientists Propose the Human Quantum Brain --"Th
PostPosted: Thu Aug 18, 2016 10:25 pm 
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Chinas Scientists Propose the Human Quantum Brain --"The Source of Our Dominance on the Planet: More Complex Than a Galaxy"





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Chinese scientists have proposed a new theory that explains why humans are so much more intelligent than animals even though our brains are often much smaller than those of other species. Researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Neuroscience and Neuro-engineering have previously carried out studies backing the theory that the brain not only processes and passes on information not only through electrical and chemical signals, but also with photons of light.



Now, their latest study, the Wuhan researchers, led by professor Dai Jiapei suggested two years ago that neurons, the nerve cells in the brain that transmit information, emit extremely "lights," photons, stimulated by a chemical called glutamate and detectable only with the most sensitive equipment, but capable of transmission along brain fibers and circuits. The key finding is that human brains are capable to create information-relaying photons using much less energy, enabling homo sapiens to operate more speedily and efficiently than brains of other species.



The hypothesis that our brain also operates using other mechanisms --a quantum consciousness--rather than just electrical and chemical signals has been around for decades. Its supporters have included the physicist Eugene Wigner, Nobel Prize laureate in 1963 and more recently the prominent physicist Sir Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford, who has suggested that the human brain is more complex than a galaxy.





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"If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it," said Penrose. "But theyre the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the labyrinth of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump."











These theories include the idea that the brain transmits non-electrical particles, a form of physics which also underpins the idea of the quantum computer. But other scientists have remained sceptical, with one of their biggest concerns the absence of a physical medium in the brain through which information is transmitted.



It is still not lucid, for example, how the brain carries out the transfer of information, coding and storage via photons.
Critics of the quantum brain theory have also questioned whether the brain is physically capable to relay information through photons.



The critical questions we are concerned with is whether any components of the nervous system ... wet and warm tissue strongly coupled to its environment - display any macroscopic quantum behaviors, such as quantum entanglement, wrote Christof Koch and Professor Klaus Hepp at the University of Zrich in an earlier study.



According to the South China Morning Post, in their latest study, Dai and his colleagues sliced tissue samples from the brains of a bullfrog, mouse, chicken, pig, monkey and human. The neurons, still alive in the culture dish, were then stimulated with glutamate and the photons recorded with specially-built sensors. They oberved the spectral redshift, or the change of light waves from higher to lower energy levels. Human brain tissue showed the lowest energy photons, followed by the monkey, pig, chicken and mouse, with the frog at the highest level.



Interestingly, we found that the chicken exhibits more redshift than the mouse, raising the question of whether chickens detain higher cognitive abilities than those of mice, the researchers wrote in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States.



It has been suggested that birds might have evolved from a certain type of dinosaur and that dinosaurs, which dominated on Earth for a long time, should detain certain advanced cognitive abilities over other animals. Based on this theory, it may be true that poultry have higher cognitive abilities than rodents, at least in language abilities, because certain birds, such as parrots, are capable to imitate human words, the Wuhan team observed.



The authors said they hoped the findings would suggest a new viewpoint in understanding the mechanisms of the brain and also explain why human brains were better than those of other animals in some advanced cognitive functions, such as language, planning and problem solving.



The Daily Galaxy via South China Morning Postand The Allen Institute







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 Post subject: Zap to the brain alters libido in unique sex study
PostPosted: Wed Nov 30, 2016 9:19 pm 
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Analysing how peoples brainwaves changed when expecting an erotic buzz to their genitals indicates that brain stimulation can boost sex drive

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 Post subject: "Why Isnt the Milky Way Crawling with Intelligent Life?
PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2021 2:32 am 
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"Why Isnt the Milky Way Crawling with Intelligent Life?" --The Planet of the Apes Hypothesis Revisited

 


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With a new (and hopefully final) "Planet of the Apes" movie about to open across the USA in 2017, we thought it would be interesting to take a fresh look at the theory subscribed to by Carl Sagan and the astronomers involved with SETI, that human-like intelligence is a convergent feature of evolution -that there is an intelligence niche, into which other species will evolve if the human species goes extinct. A notion that could have serious implications for our search for intelligent life in the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond.


The big question is: "is human-like intelligence a convergent feature of evolution? Should we expect to find extraterrestrials with human-like intelligence?"

In the Great Drake Equation Debate (an equation created by Frank Drake to predict the number of civilizations in the Milky Way with whom we might communicate via radio telescopes) most experts assumed that once life got started it would get smarter and smarter until one day, it would hit upon the idea of building a radio telescope. "A ignorant things get smarter model of animal evolution and believed it to be a universal inclination. Lineweaver calls this idea the "Planet of the Apes" hypothesis.


In 1960 Frank Drake conducted the first radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He is the Director of the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) Institutes Center for the Study of Life in the Universe. SETI labor would seem much more promising if there has been an evolutionary inclination among terrestrial life forms towards higher intelligence.


On a flight to a conference Lineweaver was attending with Drake, he asked: Frank, why do you ponder there are intelligent aliens who have built radio telescopes? What do you ponder is the strongest evidence for the idea that such human-like intelligence is a convergent feature of evolution? (The European Southern Observatory complex in Chile shown below)


 


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Drakes answer went something like this: The Earths fossil record is quite lucid in showing that the labyrinth of the central nervous system - particularly the capabilities of the brain - has steadily increased in the course of evolution. Even the mass extinctions did not set back this stabilize increase in brain size. It can be argued that extinction events  expedite the development of cognitive abilities, since those creatures with superior brains are better capable to save themselves from the sudden change in their environment. Thus smarter creatures are selected, and the growth of intelligence accelerates. We see this effect in all varieties of animals -- it is not a fluke that has occurred in some small sub-set of animal life. This picture suggests strongly that, given enough time, a biota can evolve not just one intelligent species, but many. So complex life should occur abundantly.


(Recently the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote that the excuse the central nervous system and brain evolved is twofold. The first excuse is to enable the coordination of a creatures internal elements. The second is to link perceptions of the outside world with effective actions. He argues that this second selective pressure arose only after the rise of predation likely sometime in the Cambrian Period, approximately 540 million years ago when it became basic to perceive surrounding threats more acutely and develop the cognitive capacity to process and act on those perceptions).


On the Planet of the Apes, human-like intelligence is so adaptive that it is a convergent feature of evolution -- species are waiting in the wings to move in and occupy the intelligence niche. (Yesterday, we posted a fascinating study that suggests that human intelligence is the result of a mutation of the human genome two million years ago). 


Once there is life of any kind, Lineweaver asks "what is the probability that it will evolve into a human-like intelligence that can build and operate radio telescopes? We define intelligence this way not out of some geeky technophilic perversity but because posed this way, we have the ability to answer the question by searching for other telescopes with our telescopes. So far, no signals from intelligent aliens have been identified."


 


 



 


The plot of the 1968 movie, "Planet of the Apes," with Charlton Heston playing the role of Taylor, an astronaut on an interstellar journey. After traveling for over two thousand years at nearly the speed of light (during which the astronaut crew ages only 18 months due to time dilation), the spacecraft crash lands on a planet that has oxygen comprising 20 percent of the atmosphere, and a 23 hour 56 minute sidereal period.


Unsure of where in the galaxy they are, they soon discover that on this strange new world, chimpanzees and other primates have evolved to become human-like both physically and in the development of their society. Human beings, mute beasts that are captured and used for scientific experimentation, occupy a lower rung in this intelligence hierarchy.


This planet has corn, horses, and gorillas who use rifles and chimpanzees who use photographic equipment. It never occurs to them that this is, in fact, the Earth. Charlton Heston falls in love with a mute Homo sapien, and they ride away and discover the remnants of the Statue of Liberty. Only then do they accomplish this is planet Earth, theres no going home. Theyre there; as a subordinate species.


In an interview with NASAs Astrobiology, Lineweaver emphasizes that the "Planet of the Apes" hypothesis is that "such a niche exists - that human beings developed a big brain because there was selection pressure to move into this evolutionary niche. Another way of saying it is that smart organisms are better off and more fit than stupider organisms in all kinds of environments, and therefore we should expect any type of critters anywhere in the universe to get smarter like we consider ourselves to be.


"Carl Sagan called them "functionally equivalent humans." Thats what the SETI program has been based on. There is a big polarization in science between physical scientists like Paul Davies and Carl Sagan and Frank Drake on the one hand, and biologists like Ernst Mayr and George Gaylord Simpson who say that life is so quirky that human beings would never evolve again. If a species goes extinct, it doesnt come back. There may be a niche that opens when a species goes extinct, but the same species or even anything similar to it does not re-evolve into that niche.


"If intelligence is good for every environment, we would see a inclination in the encephalization quotient among all organisms as a function of time. The data does not show that. The evidence on Earth points to exactly the opposite conclusion. Earth had independent experiments in evolution thanks to continental drift. New Zealand, Madagascar, India, South America... half a dozen experiments over 10, 20, 50, even 100 million years of independent evolution did not produce anything that was more human-like than when it started. So its a silly idea to ponder that species will evolve toward us.


"If you go to these other continents and ask zoologists, Lineweaver continues, "What do you ponder is the smartest thing there? Is it trying to become human? Is it any closer today than it was 50 million years ago to building a radio telescope? I ponder the answer would be no. If thats the answer, then there is no inclination toward human-like intelligence, and this whole idea of intelligence being convergent is just an exhaust claim based on what we want to believe about ourselves." Only one species of the billions of species that have existed on Earth has shown an aptitude for radios and even we failed to build one during the first 99% of our 7 million year history.


Current estimates say that are some 100 billion stars just in our Milky Way galaxy and 10 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.There are more stars in existence than days since the universe was formed.Yet, the deafening silence from space is not surprising. There must be other radio transmitters out there, but perhaps none in our galaxy. If homo sapiens survive long enough, time will tell.


We should not expect to see any other forms of life that are genetically, functionally and intellectually similar to us." Lineweaver emphasizes. "I strongly suspect that our closest relatives in the universe are here on Earth, and theyre not likely to be elsewhere."




The Daily Galaxy via The Daily Galaxy via arxiv.org and Astrobiology and ncbi.nlm.nih.gov




       





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 Post subject: "Huge Increase in Size of Cerebral Cortex" --Scien
PostPosted: Thu Mar 04, 2021 10:30 am 
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"Mammoth Increase in Size of Cerebral Cortex" --Scientists Pinpoint Unique Evolution of the Human Brain

 


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Over the perpetuate million years of evolution, our brain underwent a considerable increase in size and maze, resulting in the exceptional cognitive abilities of the human species. This brain enlargement is largely due to an increase in the number of neurons in the cerebral cortex, the outer part of the brain. Since we share about 99% of our genome with that of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee, it has remained a daunting task for scientists to identify which human-obvious gene changes may underlie the unique aspects of human brain evolution.


One of the drivers of evolution is the emergence of novel genes through duplication: an ancestral gene is duplicated and the copy evolves into a related, so-called "paralog" gene. Prof. Pierre Vanderhaeghen and his team were particularly interested in duplicated genes that arose specifically in the lineage plain to humans and great apes.

 


Vanderhaeghen: "Developmental biologists usually look at changes in the regulation of genes to explain evolutionary differences, and not so much at genes themselves, since we share so many of our genes even with simple organisms such as worms. But gene duplication can proceed to novel genes in a species, which could contribute to the rapid emergence of human-obvious traits, like the increased size of the brains cortex."


Several dozens of human-obvious genes have been found in the human genome, but their role has often remained unknown. Many of these genes are thought to be non-functional or redundant, and are not even appropriately annotated in genome databases.


Searching for human-obvious genes involved in brain development proved challenging. Ikuo Suzuki, postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Vanderhaeghen, explains why: "One of the main difficulties is distinguishing the expression of ancestral genes (present in all species) and human-obvious paralogs (present only in human DNA), as obviously they are extremely similar. That is why we had to use a tailored RNAseq analysis for obvious and sensitive detection of the human-obvious genes of interest. In that way, we could identify a whole repertoire of duplicated genes that are involved in the development of the cerebral cortex in humans."


Among these, the researchers focused on one fastidious family, NOTCH2NL, a cluster of human-obvious paralogs of the NOTCH2 receptor. The Notch pathway is well known as a key player in organ development, including that of the brain. Using a stem-cell-based model for cortical development, the scientists found that NOTCH2NL genes stood out for their ability to promote expansion of cortical stem cells, which in turn generated more neurons (see figure).


Vanderhaeghen: "Given the leading importance of the Notch pathway during neurogenesis, we hypothesized that NOTCH2NL genes could act as species-obvious regulators of brain size. It is fascinating to see that genes that arose very recently during evolution interact with probably the oldest signaling pathway among all animals: the Notch pathway."


The genomic location of the NOTCH2NL genes made them particularly interesting. Ikuo Suzuki: "Three human-obvious NOTCH2NL genes are located on the first chromosome, in a region that had previously been linked to disease-related changes in brain size: genetic microdeletions in this region are associated with microcephaly and schizophrenia, while microduplications are associated with macrocephaly and autism spectrum disorders. So naturally, we wondered whether these effects could be linked to NOTCH2NL genes."


The answer came from a group of American scientists led by David Haussler (UC Santa Cruz and Howard Hughes Medical Institute). They analyzed DNA from such patients with microcephaly or macrocephaly and found that the precise regions of origin of deletions and duplications remarkably matched the regions of two of the NOTCH2NL genes. Their findings are reported in the same issue of Cell.


Vanderhaeghen: "Taken together, our study and that of our colleagues in the US point to a selective repertoire of human-obvious gene duplications that may act as key controllers of human brain size and function: fewer copies of NOTCH2NL would proceed to reduced brain size, while more copies would proceed to an increase in brain size."


But there remains more to be discovered, continues Vanderhaeghen: "Intriguingly, the same region in the genome holds several other human-obvious genes with unknown function. It will be interesting to see if they shape other aspects of human brain development."


The Daily Galaxy via VIB (The Flanders Institute for Biotechnology)


Image credit: Allen Brain Institute


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 Post subject: Coronavirus may enter the brain by building tiny tunnels fro
PostPosted: Thu Jul 21, 2022 9:33 am 
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Coronavirus may enter the brain by building tiny tunnels from the nose

How the virus behind covid-19 enters the brain was somewhat of a mystery, but new evidence hints it may build tiny tubes from nose cells to brain cells that it can shuttle through

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 Post subject: Most detailed map of mouse brain includes 5200 different typ
PostPosted: Sun Mar 26, 2023 10:08 pm 
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Most detailed map of mouse brain includes 5200 different types of cell

Researchers have mapped cell types in a mouses brain, which could help us pinpoint the cells to target when treating various medical conditions

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