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Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.

“If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done

Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.

a new app for the treatment of phobias. You stare at pictures of dental drills, snakes or airplane interiors, depending on your affliction, and these totems of menace  — interspersed with reassuring images of teddy bears  — gradually cease to provoke you.

Another person wrote: “I am terrified of string. You know, when you have a loose string hanging off your clothes. Most people just shrug it off.” (Who knew?) “But I go insane until I get it off the item.”Balloons, pigeons, boats, bald men, cotton batten, garden peas. These have all acted as the culprits, according to reports I’ve received, in making otherwise reasonable human beings assume the visage of Edvard Munch’s screamer. People fear chins, condiments, towels, cut fruit.The object appears to be irrelevant, in many cases, beyond its subconscious assignation as the Very Thing to Fear.

One attempts to find logical causes for phobia at one’s peril.

these findings suggest that the neurophysiological mechanisms that we employ while dreaming (and recalling dreams) are the same as when we construct and retrieve memories while we are awake.

the researchers found that vivid, bizarre and emotionally intense dreams (the dreams that people usually remember) are linked to parts of the amygdala and hippocampus. While the amygdala plays a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the hippocampus has been implicated in important memory functions, such as the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory.

it was not until a few years ago that a patient reported to have lost her ability to dream while having virtually no other permanent neurological symptoms. The patient suffered a lesion in a part of the brain known as the right inferior lingual gyrus (located in the visual cortex). Thus, we know that dreams are generated in, or transmitted through this particular area of the brain, which is associated with visual processing, emotion and visual memories.

This three-pound organ is the seat of intelligence, interpreter of the senses, initiator of body movement, and controller of behavior

excessive reporting of positive results in papers that describe animal testing of potential therapies, just like the publishing bias seen in clinical research, according to a paper published today

We know publication bias happens a lot in clinical trials,” said Torgerson, “so I was surprised at myself for being surprised at the results, because of course, if it happens in human research, why wouldn’t it happen in animal research?”

his suspicions about publication bias by performing a statistical meta-analysis of thousands of reported animal tests for various neurological interventions—a total of 4,445 reported tests of 160 different drugs and other treatments for conditions that included Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, brain ischemia, and more.

Genomic analyses of single human neurons—either from postmortem brains or those derived in culture—reveal a considerable degree of DNA copy number variation, according to a paper

likely that these genetic differences affect brain cell function, and they may even shape our personalities, academic abilities, and susceptibilities to neurological diseases.

There was a really long-standing hypothesis that given the huge diversity of cell types in the brain, there might be [genetic] mechanisms . . . to generate [the] diversity,” Hall explained.

first neurosurgeries took place about 7,000 years ago in South America with the boring of holes into hapless patients’ skulls, a process known as trephination. Practitioners of the day believed the source of neurologic and psychiatric disease to be evil spirits inhabiting the brain, and the way to treat such disorders, they reasoned, was to make holes in the skull and let the evil spirits escape. The procedure was surprisingly common, with as many as 1 percent of skulls at some archaeological sites having these holes.

disorders is a consequence of pathological activity within a specific brain circuit. In Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, neurons in the motor circuits misfire, causing aberrant movements of the limbs and torso. Malfunction in circuits that regulate mood can lead to depression.

observing patients’ behavioral changes following the stimulation or inhibition of specific neural circuits, DBS is helping to explain what goes wrong in the brain to cause symptoms

are we capable of substantial moral improvement? Could we someday be much better ethically than we are now? Is it likely that members of our species could become, on average, more generous or more honest, less self-deceptive or less self-interested?

I’d like to focus here on a more recent moment: 19th-century America, where the great optimism and idealism of a rapidly rising nation was tempered by a withering realism.

Emerson thought that “the Spirit who led us hither” would help perfect us; others have believed the agent of improvement to be evolution, or the inevitable progress of civilization. More recent advocates of our perfectibility might focus on genetic or neurological interventions, or — as in Ray Kurzweil’s “When Singularity Is Near” — information technologies.

Neurologically, how does our brain adapt itself to new technologies? Nicholas Carr: A couple of types of adaptations take place in your brain. One is a strengthening of the synaptical connections between the neurons involved in using that instrument, in using that tool. And basically these are chemical – neural chemical changes. So you know, cells in our brain communicate by transmitting electrical signals between them and those electrical signals are actually activated by the exchange of chemicals, neurotransmitters in our synapses. And so when you begin to use a tool, for instance, you have much stronger electrochemical signals being processed in those – through those synaptical connections. And then the second, and even more interesting adaptation is in actual physical changes,anatomical changes. Your neurons, you may grow new neurons that are then recruited into these circuits or your existing neurons may grow new synaptical terminals. And again, that also serves to strengthen the activity in those, in those particular pathways that are being used – new pathways. On the other hand, you know, the brain likes to be efficient and so even as its strengthening the pathways you’re exercising, it’s pulling – it’s weakening the connections in other ways between the cells that supported old ways of thinking or working or behaving, or whatever that you’re not exercising so much.

And it was only in around the year 800 or 900 that we saw the introduction of word spaces. And suddenly reading became, in a sense, easier and suddenly you had to arrival of silent reading, which changed the act of reading from just transcription of speech to something that every individual did on their own. And suddenly you had this whole deal of the silent solitary reader who was improving their mind, expanding their horizons, and so forth. And when Guttenberg invented the printing press around 1450, what that served to do was take this new very attentive, very deep form of reading, which had been limited to just, you know, monasteries and universities, and by making books much cheaper and much more available, spread that way of reading out to a much larger mass of audience. And so we saw, for the last 500 years or so, one of the central facts of culture was deep solitary reading.

What the book does as a technology is shield us from distraction. The only thinggoing on is the, you know, the progression of words and sentences across page after page and so suddenly we see this immersive kind of very attentive thinking, whether you are paying attention to a story or to an argument, or whatever. And what we know about the brain is the brain adapts to these types of tools.

We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them. If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

it's not just the coiled cortex that gives rise to the mind—it's the entire body. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes, "The mind is embodied, not just embrained."

new study of probiotic bacteria, the microorganisms typically found in yogurt and dairy products. While most investigations of probiotics have focused on their gastrointestinal benefits—the bacteria reduce the symptoms of diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome—this new research explored the effect of probiotics on the brain.

those fed probiotics had more GABA receptors in areas associated with memory and the regulation of emotions. (This change mimics the effects of popular antianxiety medications in humans.)

people who meditate frequently behave in a more rational manner than non-meditators, and they do so because different parts of their brain take charge of certain kinds of decisions.

in the Ultimatum Game, you only get one shot, and the smart move is to take the free money. Punishing greed serves no purpose there, but people do it consistently.

Meditators began rejecting offers at the same point, but the rate of their decline leveled off around 50% for very poor offers (18:2 and 19:1), while the control group kept dropping. In other words, they were less willing to punish greedy behavior, and more willing to behave rationally by accepting unfair offers.

As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language.

The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Incidentally, neuroscience confirms another bit of Christmas wisdom: that the anticipation of the holiday can be as exhilarating as receiving the actual gifts. Rodent research suggests that addicted rats experience pleasure, neurologically speaking, when they anticipate receiving cocaine, even if they don’t actually consume it

"The areas of the brain related to language ramped way up when the musical behavior was spontaneous between the two musicians,"

"During the improvised exchanges, the parts of the brain that interpret the meaning of language — semantics — were completely deactivated,"

This could suggest there is a fundamental difference between how the brain processes meaning for music and language.

Brain signature of emotion-linked pain is uncovered

it is possible to distinguish between brain activity associated with pain from a physical cause, such as an injury, and that associated with pain linked to your state of mind.

Hearing or vision, for example, can be traced from sensory organs to distinct brain regions, but pain is more complex, and incorporates thoughts and emotions.