Misreading the mind - Los Angeles Times

 

Some of the most exciting endeavors in neuroscience right now are trying to move beyond reductionism. The Blue Brain Project, for example, a collaboration between the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, and IBM, is in the process of constructing a biologically accurate model of the brain that can be used to simulate experience on a supercomputer. Henry Markram, the leader of the project, recently told me that he's convinced "reductionism peaked five years ago." While Markram is quick to add that the reductionism program isn't complete -- "There is still so much that we don't know about the brain," he says -- he's trying to solve a harder problem, which is figuring out how all these cellular details connect together. "The Blue Brain Project" he says, "is about showing people the whole." In other words, Markram wants to hear the music.
One day, we'll look back at the history of neuroscience and realize that reductionism was just the first phase. Each year, tens of thousands of neuroscience papers are published in scientific journals. The field is introduced to countless new acronyms, pathways and proteins. At a certain point, however, all of this detail starts to have diminishing returns. After all, the real paradox of the brain is why it feels like more than the sum of its parts. How does our pale gray matter become the Technicolor cinema of consciousness? What transforms the water of the brain into the wine of the mind? Where does the self come from?
Reductionism can't answer these questions. According to the facts of neuroscience, your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows you or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. You are simply an elaborate cognitive illusion, an "epiphenomenon" of the cortex. Our mystery is denied.

Misreading the mind - Los Angeles Times

Ovarian cancer stem cells identified, characterized

This is another indication of stem cell involvement with cancer 

“Present chemotherapy modalities eliminate the bulk of the tumor cells, but cannot eliminate a core of these cancer stem cells that have a high capacity for renewal,” said Mor, who is also a member of the Yale Cancer Center. “Identification of these cells, as we have done here, is the first step in the development of therapeutic modalities.”

Mor and colleagues isolated cells from 80 human samples of either peritoneal fluid or solid tumors. The cancer stem cells that were identified were positive for traditional cancer stem cell markers including CD44 and MyD88. These cells also showed a high capacity for repair and self-renewal.

The isolated cells formed tumors 100 percent of the time. Within those tumors, 10 percent of the cells were positive for cancer stem cell marker CD44, while 90 percent were CD44 negative.

Mor and his team were able to isolate and clone the ovarian cancer stem cells. They found that these cells were highly resistant to conventional chemotherapy while the non-cancer stem cells responded to treatment. “Isolating and cloning these cells will lead to development of new treatments to target and eliminate the cancer stem cells and hopefully prevent recurrence,” said Mor.

Ovarian cancer stem cells identified, characterized

Technorati Tags: Ovarian Cancer

Biology News Net - Email to a Friend

 

http://www.biologynews.net/archives/2008/04/17/intelligence_and_rhythmic_accuracy_go_hand_in_hand.html

This is one more indicator of how the brain works

Biology News Net - Email to a Friend

Blue Brain Project

 

The Blue Brain project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.

In July 2005, EPFL and IBM announced an exciting new research initiative - a project to create a biologically accurate, functional model of the brain using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. Analogous in scope to the Genome Project, the Blue Brain will provide a huge leap in our understanding of brain function and dysfunction and help us explore solutions to intractable problems in mental health and neurological disease.

At the end of 2006, the Blue Brain project had created a model of the basic functional unit of the brain, the neocortical column. At the push of a button, the model could reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations.

In November, 2007, the Blue Brain project reached an important milestone and the conclusion of its first Phase, with the announcement of an entirely new data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column.

Blue Brain Project

Wormtown Taxi: Chasing Down the Soul with Blue Brain

Wormtown Taxi: Chasing Down the Soul

I found the reference to the article about Blue Brain in Seed Magazine on this post. The author is right in saying that the nine page article is very informative and will leave you thinking.

Seed: The Ghost in the Machine

 

According to Markram, consciousness is the natural result of the way the human brain is constructed. It will emerge from simulations once those simulations approach reality.

There is nothing inherently mysterious about the mind or anything it makes," Markram says. "Consciousness is just a massive amount of information being exchanged by trillions of brain cells. If you can precisely model that information, then I don't know why you wouldn't be able to generate a conscious mind." At moments like this, Markram takes on the deflating air of a magician exposing his own magic tricks. He seems to relish the idea of "debunking consciousness," showing that it's no more metaphysical than any other property of the mind. Consciousness is a binary code; the self is a loop of electricity. A ghost will emerge from the machine once the machine is built right.

Seed: Out of the Blue

Technorati Tags: consciousness

Seed: Out of the Blue

Markram proposes the use of a robotic rat to provide the body for his rat brain simulation which he hopes to have in two years.

Some philosophers, like Thomas Nagel, have argued that this divide between the physical facts of neuroscience and the reality of subjective experience represents an epistemological dead end. No matter how much we know about our neurons, we still won't be able to explain how a twitch of ions in the frontal cortex becomes the Technicolor cinema of consciousness.

Markram takes these criticisms seriously. Nevertheless, he believes that Blue Brain is uniquely capable of transcending the limits of "conventional neuroscience," breaking through the mind-body problem. According to Markram, the power of Blue Brain is that it can transform a metaphysical paradox into a technological problem. "There's no reason why you can't get inside Blue Brain," Markram says. "Once we can model a brain, we should be able to model what every brain makes. We should be able to experience the experiences of another mind."

When listening to Markram speculate, it's easy to forget that the Blue Brain simulation is still just a single circuit, confined within a silent supercomputer. The machine is not yet alive. And yet Markram can be persuasive when he talks about his future plans. His ambitions are grounded in concrete steps. Once the team is able to model a complete rat brain—that should happen in the next two years—Markram will download the simulation into a robotic rat, so that the brain has a body. He's already talking to a Japanese company about constructing the mechanical animal. "The only way to really know what the model is capable of is to give it legs," he says. "If the robotic rat just bumps into walls, then we've got a problem."

Installing Blue Brain in a robot will also allow it to develop like a real rat. The simulated cells will be shaped by their own sensations, constantly revising their connections based upon the rat's experiences. "What you ultimately want," Markram says, "is a robot that's a little bit unpredictable, that doesn't just do what we tell it to do." His goal is to build a virtual animal—a rodent robot—with a mind of its own.

Seed: Out of the Blue

Technorati Tags: Markram,Blue Brain,Thomas Nagel

Seed: Out of the Blue

The article referred to in the link below describes how Blue Brain works.  If the author's belief that the human brain can be made from a scaled up version of the virtual synapses we have now then we only wait for the arrival of much more powerful computers.  Many experts point to around the year 2020. 

 

 

Seed: Out of the Blue 

In fact, the model is so successful that its biggest restrictions are now technological. "We have already shown that the model can scale up," Markram says. "What is holding us back now are the computers." The numbers speak for themselves. Markram estimates that in order to accurately simulate the trillion synapses in the human brain, you'd need to be able to process about 500 petabytes of data (peta being a million billion, or 10 to the fifteenth power). That's about 200 times more information than is stored on all of Google's servers. (Given current technology, a machine capable of such power would be the size of several football fields.) Energy consumption is another huge problem. The human brain requires about 25 watts of electricity to operate. Markram estimates that simulating the brain on a supercomputer with existing microchips would generate an annual electrical bill of about $3 billion . But if computing speeds continue to develop at their current exponential pace, and energy efficiency improves, Markram believes that he'll be able to model a complete human brain on a single machine in ten years or less.

Seed: Out of the Blue

 

Technorati Tags: Blue brain,synapse

Seed: Suspending Life

 

We mammals, who evolved from the creatures that survived this inhospitable time, were marked by what happened. All animals bear the physiological scars left by the past greenhouse extinctions and hydrogen sulfide events, and we mammals are no exception. The difficulty is knowing where to look for the scars.

I believe the work of Mark Roth and his group may have finally uncovered the survival mechanism of our ancestors. While high levels of H₂S kill mammals, Roth's team has found that very low levels of the toxin can prolong their lives. H₂S reduces oxygen levels in the body, and though too much causes death by oxygen starvation, a bit less slows a creature's metabolism. This alone is an amazing finding. But Roth has gone further, inducing suspended animation in mammals. By exposing lab mice to small doses of H₂S, Roth and his team can put them into the deepest of sleeps--with very slow, or even no heartbeats--for several hours. In that time, the mice can be cooled to temperatures that would have killed them prior to the H₂S exposure.

Roth has already begun testing his work on other mammals. If he is correct, hydrogen sulfide may provide a way of saving lives so revolutionary that it will change trauma medicine forever. He is redefining what we thought we knew about death and dying. Death may not be as final as we think.

When we humans are cut or injured, our bodies naturally produce small quantities of hydrogen sulfide. In essence, the body may be trying to put itself into suspended animation to survive the injury, an instinct held over millions of years in our genes. Yet whenever one of us is dying, say from a heart attack, our first instinct is to give that person oxygen. The problem with this "life-saving" first response may be that the oxygenated red blood cells rush to the damaged cells and act like gasoline on a fire. Oxygen is one of the most chemically active substances on Earth, and though we need it to survive, it can ravage our bodies. The oxygen increases the reactions causing the heart attack in the first place; it tears up more cells and overwhelms the virtual suspended animation that the body-produced hydrogen sulfide created. Then it kills you.

Perhaps our first instinct in instances of a heart attack should be to cool the body and let hydrogen sulfide do its natural work. To save life, in other words, you may first have to effectively suspend it with hydrogen sulfide. This tactic may just be what got us so far in the first place.

There is no clear understanding yet of why our injured bodies are able to produce hydrogen sulfide or why H₂S puts some mammals into suspended animation. But I believe that Roth has found our body's own memory of the ancient events that nearly killed our distant ancestors. Some proto-mammals may have been exposed to H₂S, and instead of dying, they were placed into a state of suspended animation that allowed them to survive until the initial hydrogen sulfide levels subsided and they were reanimated. Some lucky evolutionary accident ensured the mammals' safety through a deep sleep, and that accident may still be dormant within us. That which allowed our ancestors to survive millions of years ago might also be a means of our survival now.

< Previous

Page all of 4

Next >

Seed: Suspending Life

 

Technorati Tags: Mark Roth,Suspended Animation,mass extinction,Permian extinction,hydrogen sulfide

Biologists find first lungless frog

 

Biologists have found the first recorded species of frog that breathes without lungs in a clear, cold-water stream on the island of Borneo in Indonesia.

According to a report in National Geographic News, the frog, named “Barbourula kalimantanensis”, gets all its oxygen through its skin.

“Nobody knew about the lunglessness before we accidentally discovered it doing routine dissections,” said David Bickford, a biologist at the National University of Singapore.

Biologists find first lungless frog

Worm Turns Cricket Into Zombie!

 

 

What does this say about the ability to induce behavior?  Proteomics has many surprises I think

 

Technorati Tags: proteomics,zombie

BBC NEWS | Health | Daily caffeine 'protects brain'

 

Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.

The drink has already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer's Disease, and a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation may explain why.

BBC NEWS | Health | Daily caffeine 'protects brain'

Technorati Tags: dementia

Blue Brain Out-Thinks Its Critics

 

We first posted about the Blue Brain Project back in 2005. The idea was to use massive computing power to accurately simulate enough biological neurons to reproduce part of a mammal brain's functionality. The project was widely criticized as "ridiculous". With the recent successful conclusion of the project's first phase, critics who claimed the project was "bound to fail" have been effectively proven wrong. The current system accurately reproduces the neocortical column of a two-week old rat, composed of 10,000 neurons with 30 types of ion channels and 30 million interconnections. Surprisingly, at least to the critics, the computational structure does what the biological structure does even at the level of individual neurons. But don't get too excited yet, the researchers believe reproducing an entire Human brain would require processing over 500 petabytes of data. A computer like that is 10 years away if Moore's law continues to hold. To build it using today's processors would result in a brain that costs $3 billion per year in electricity to operate (versus our meat brains that need only 25 watts!) Meanwhile, SEED magazine has an article about the recent achievements of the Blue Brain and the conscious entities blog has written some thoughtful commentary about the project.

Blue Brain Out-Thinks Its Critics

 

Technorati Tags: blue brain

Tiny Brain-Like Computer Created - Yahoo! News

 

The most powerful computer known is the brain, and now scientists have designed a machine just a few molecules large that mimics how the brain works.

So far the device can simultaneously carry out 16 times more operations than a normal computer transistor. Researchers suggest the invention might eventually prove able to perform roughly 1,000 times more operations than a transistor.

The device is made of a compound known as duroquinone. This molecule resembles a hexagonal plate with four cones linked to it, "like a small car," explained researcher Anirban Bandyopadhyay, an artificial intelligence and molecular electronics scientist at the National Institute for Materials Science at Tsukuba in Japan. Duroquinone is less than a nanometer, or a billionth of a meter large. This makes it hundreds of times smaller than a wavelength of visible light. The machine is made of 17 duroquinone molecules. One molecule sits at the center of a ring formed by the remaining 16. The entire invention sits on a surface of gold.

Tiny Brain-Like Computer Created - Yahoo! News

Technorati Tags: duroquinone