Brain Computer Interfaces Are Still A Loooong Ways Away...,

technologyreview |  In a 12-by-20-foot room at a skilled-nursing facility in Menlo Park, California, researchers are testing the next evolution of the computer interface inside the soft matter of Dennis DeGray’s motor cortex. DeGray is paralyzed from the neck down. He was hurt in a freak fall in his yard while taking out the trash and is, he says, “as laid up as a person can be.” He steers his wheelchair by puffing into a tube. 

But DeGray is a virtuoso at using his brain to control a computer mouse. For the last five years, he has been a participant in BrainGate, a series of clinical trials in which surgeons have inserted silicon probes the size of a baby aspirin into the brains of more than 20 paralyzed people. Using these brain-computer interfaces, researchers can measure the firing of dozens of neurons as people think of moving their arms and hands. And by sending these signals to a computer, the scientists have enabled those with the implants to grasp objects with robot arms and steer planes around in flight simulators. 

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DeGray is the world’s fastest brain typist. He first established the mark four years ago, using his brain signals to roam over a virtual keyboard with a point-and-click cursor. Selecting letters on a screen, he reached a rate of eight correct words in a minute. Then, right before the covid-19 pandemic began, he demolished his own record, using a new technique where he imagined he was hand-­writing letters on lined paper. With that approach, he managed 18 words per minute.

One of the people responsible for the studies with DeGray is Krishna Shenoy, a Stanford University neuroscientist and electrical engineer who is among the leaders of the BrainGate project. While other brain-interface researchers grabbed the limelight with more spectacular demonstrations, Shenoy’s group has stayed focused on creating a practical interface that paralyzed patients can use for everyday computer interactions. “We had to persevere in the early days, when people said Ah, it’s cooler to do a robotic arm—it makes a better movie,” says Shenoy. But “if you can click, then you can use Gmail, surf the Web, and play music.” 

Shenoy says he is developing the technology for people with “the worst afflictions and the most need.” Those include patients who are utterly locked in and unable to speak, like those in the end stage of ALS. 

But if the technology allows people like DeGray to link their brain directly to a computer, why not extend it to others? In 2016, Elon Musk started a company called Neuralink that began developing a neural “sewing machine” to implant a new type of threaded electrode. Musk said his goal was to establish a high-throughput connection to human brains so that society could keep pace with artificial intelligence. 

The Energing Rennaissance In Neuromancy

nature |  A human brain slice is placed in a microscope to visualize nerve fibres. Credit: Mareen Fischinger

Imagine looking at Earth from space and being able to listen in on what individuals are saying to each other. That’s about how challenging it is to understand how the brain works.

From the organ’s wrinkled surface, zoom in a million-fold and you’ll see a kaleidoscope of cells of different shapes and sizes, which branch off and reach out to each other. Zoom in a further 100,000 times and you’ll see the cells’ inner workings — the tiny structures in each one, the points of contact between them and the long-distance connections between brain areas.

Scientists have made maps such as these for the worm¹ and fly² brains, and for tiny parts of the mouse³ and human⁴ brains. But those charts are just the start. To truly understand how the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to exist in the brain speak to each other in their different electrical dialects. With that kind of complete, finely contoured map, they could really begin to explain the networks that drive how we think and behave.

Such maps are emerging, including in a series of papers published this week that catalogue the cell types in the brain. Results are streaming in from government efforts to understand and stem the increasing burden of brain disorders in their ageing populations. These projects, launched over the past decade, aim to systematically chart the brain’s connections and catalogue its cell types and their physiological properties.

It’s an onerous undertaking. “But knowing all the brain cell types, how they connect with each other and how they interact, will open up an entirely new set of therapies that we can’t even imagine today,” says Josh Gordon, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland.

The largest projects started in 2013, when the US government and the European Commission launched ‘moonshot’ efforts to provide services to researchers that will help to crack the mammalian brain’s code. They each poured vast resources into large-scale systematic programmes with different goals. The US effort — which is estimated to cost US$6.6 billion up until 2027 — has focused on developing and applying new mapping technologies in its BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative (see ‘Big brain budgets’). The European Commission and its partner organizations have spent €607 million ($703 million) on the Human Brain Project (HBP), which is aimed mainly at creating simulations of the brain’s circuitry and using those models as a platform for experiments.

 

Is An Ancient Virus The Physical Substrate For Memory Formation?

royalsocietyofbiology |  Understanding how memories are formed and stored is one of the great enigmas in neuroscience. After more than a century of research, detailed knowledge of the mechanisms of memory formation remain elusive.

In the past decade, memory research has been advanced by the study of neuronal engrams, or networks of neurons that are incorporated into a memory. In particular brain regions associated with memory, a neuronal engram is theorised to consist of a subset of neurons within that brain region that is uniquely activated by a behaviour that leads to memory formation.

For example, when mice are trained on a simple, initial behavioural task, a certain subset of neurons within a specific brain region will become activated. Genetic techniques can be used to ‘tag’ this network of neurons.

If the mouse is then placed in a different behavioural or environmental context, and the network of neurons from the initial behavioural task is artificially activated, the mouse will display behaviour that it learned in the initial task[1]. The initial behavioural task triggered the incorporation of a subset of neurons into an engram, which encoded the memory for that task.

Given the vast number of neurons in the brain, the potential combination of neurons that could make up separate memory engrams is virtually limitless. So the question that is key to our understanding of the mechanisms of memory formation is: what causes the incorporation of one neuron, but not another, into memory engrams?

Research has demonstrated that certain proteins can ‘prime’ neurons for incorporation into an engram[2]. Neurons that naturally express more of these proteins are frequently found in memory engrams for a behaviour. Artificially inducing more of these substances to be expressed can encourage neurons to become part of an engram.

One substance in particular that was found to be important for priming neurons for engram incorporation is known as Arc[3]. This protein is induced rapidly by neuronal activity and regulates levels of receptors at synapses that are critical for synaptic function and neuronal communication.

Mice that genetically lack Arc protein are unable to form memories that last longer than the course of a behavioural training session (known as long-term memories), although they can learn normally at short-term time scales. Although these experimental findings suggest that Arc is an important piece of the memory puzzle, the mechanisms that regulate Arc at the cellular and molecular level remain unclear.

Recently, research I conducted in the laboratory of Dr Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah[4] revealed something very surprising: Arc structurally and functionally resembles a retrovirus such as HIV. This is the first time a neuronal protein, much less one underlying a process as crucial as memory formation, has been shown to have a viral structure. Evolutionary analysis from our laboratory showed that Arc protein is distantly related to a class of retrotransposons that also gave rise to retroviruses such as HIV.

Does Music Link Space and Time in Brain Dynamics?

opentheory |  I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome-specific harmonic wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we understand the brain and mind in the future, and it’s basically where predictive coding was in 2011, or where blockchain was in 2009. Which is to say, it’s destined for great things and this is a really good time to get into it.

I described CSHW in my last post as:

Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (CSHW) is a new method for interpreting neuroimaging which (unlike conventional approaches) may plausibly measure things directly relevant to phenomenology. Essentially, it’s a method for combining fMRI/DTI/MRI to calculate a brain’s intrinsic ‘eigenvalues’, or the neural frequencies which naturally resonate in a given brain, as well as the way the brain is currently distributing energy (periodic neural activity) between these eigenvalues.

This post is going to talk a little more about how CSHW works, why it’s so powerful, and what sorts of things we could use it for.

CSHW: the basics

All periodic systems have natural modes— frequencies they ‘like’ to resonate at. A tuning fork is a very simple example of this: regardless of how it’s hit, most of the vibration energy quickly collapses to one frequency- the natural resonant frequency of the fork.

All musical instruments work on this principle; when you change the fingering on a trumpet or flute, you’re changing the natural resonances of the instrument. 

CSHW’s big insight is that brains have these natural resonances too, although they differ slightly from brain to brain. And instead of some external musician choosing which notes (natural resonances) to play, the brain sort of ‘tunes itself,’ based on internal dynamics, external stimuli, and context.

The beauty of CSHW is that it’s a quantitative model, not just loose metaphor: neural activation and inhibition travel as an oscillating wave with a characteristic wave propagation pattern, which we can reasonably estimate, and the substrate in which they propagate is the the brain’s connectome (map of neural connections), which we can also reasonably estimate.

Neuropolitics: Computers See You In Ways You Can't See Yourself

TechnologyReview |  This spring there was a widespread outcry when American Facebook users found out that information they had posted on the social network—including their likes, interests, and political preferences—had been mined by the voter-targeting firm Cambridge Analytica. While it’s not clear how effective they were, the company’s algorithms may have helped fuel Donald Trump’s come-from-behind victory in 2016.

But to ambitious data scientists like Pocovi, who has worked with major political parties in Latin America in recent elections, Cambridge Analytica, which shut down in May, was behind the curve. Where it gauged people’s receptiveness to campaign messages by analyzing data they typed into Facebook, today’s “neuropolitical” consultants say they can peg voters’ feelings by observing their spontaneous responses: an electrical impulse from a key brain region, a split-­second grimace, or a moment’s hesitation as they ponder a question. The experts aim to divine voters’ intent from signals they’re not aware they’re producing. A candidate’s advisors can then attempt to use that biological data to influence voting decisions.

Political insiders say campaigns are buying into this prospect in increasing numbers, even if they’re reluctant to acknowledge it. “It’s rare that a campaign would admit to using neuromarketing techniques—though it’s quite likely the well-funded campaigns are,” says Roger Dooley, a consultant and author of Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing. While it’s not certain the Trump or Clinton campaigns used neuromarketing in 2016, SCL—the parent firm of Cambridge Analytica, which worked for Trump—has reportedly used facial analysis to assess whether what voters said they felt about candidates was genuine.

But even if US campaigns won’t admit to using neuromarketing, “they should be interested in it, because politics is a blood sport,” says Dan Hill, an American expert in facial-expression coding who advised Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012 election campaign. Fred Davis, a Republican strategist whose clients have included George W. Bush, John McCain, and Elizabeth Dole, says that while uptake of these technologies is somewhat limited in the US, campaigns would use neuromarketing if they thought it would give them an edge. “There’s nothing more important to a politician than winning,” he says.

The trend raises a torrent of questions in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. How well can consultants like these use neurological data to target or sway voters? And if they are as good at it as they claim, can we trust that our political decisions are truly our own? Will democracy itself start to feel the squeeze?

Both Gaming And Pocket Rectangles Are Process Addictions

WaPo |  For many people, leisure time now means screen time. Mom’s on social media, Dad’s surfing the Web, sister is texting friends, and brother is playing a multiplayer shooting game like Fortnite.

But are they addicted? In June, the World Health Organization announced that “gaming disorder” would be included in its disease classification manual, reigniting debates over whether an activity engaged in by so many could be classified as a disorder.

Experts were quick to point out that only 1 to 3 percent of gamers are likely to fit the diagnostic criteria, such as lack of control over gaming, giving gaming priority over other activities and allowing gaming to significantly impair such important areas of life as social relationships.

Those low numbers may give the impression that most people don’t have anything to worry about. Not true. Nearly all teens, as well as most adults, have been profoundly affected by the increasing predominance of electronic devices in our lives. Many people suspect that today’s teens spend much more time with screens and much less time with their peers face-to-face than did earlier generations, and my analysis of numerous large surveys of teens of various ages shows this to be true: The number of 17- and 18-year-olds who get together with their friends every day, for example, dropped by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2016. Teens are also sleeping less, with sleep deprivation spiking after 2010. Similar to the language in the WHO’s addiction criteria, they are prioritizing time on their electronic devices over other activities (and no, it’s not because they are studying more: Teens actually spend less time on homework than students did in the 1990s). Regardless of any questions around addiction, how teens spend their free time has fundamentally shifted.

If teens were doing well, this might be fine. But they are not: Clinical-level depression, self-harm behavior (such as cutting), the number of suicide attempts and the suicide rate for teens all rose sharply after 2010, when smartphones became common and the iPad was introduced. Teens who spend excessive amounts of time online are more likely to be sleep deprived, unhappy and depressed. Nor are the effects small: For example, teens who spent five or more hours a day using electronic devices were 66 percent more likely than those who spent just one hour to have at least one risk factor for suicide, such as depression or a previous suicide attempt.

It's Nothing Like A Broken Leg

Guardian |  When I am well, I am happy and popular. It is tough to type these words when I feel none of it. And sometimes when I am most well I am… boring. Boring is how I want to be all of the time. This is what I have been working towards, for 12 years now.

When friends decades older tell me off for saying that I am old, at 28, what I mean is: I haven’t achieved all the things I could have done without this illness. I should have written a book by now. I should have done so many things! All the time, I feel I am playing catch-up. Always. I worry, and most of the literature tells me, that I will have this problem for life. That it will go on, after the hashtags and the documentaries and the book deals and Princes Harry and William – while the NHS circles closer to the drain.

Maybe it’s cute now, in my 20s. But it won’t be cute later, when I am older and wearing tracksuits from 20 years ago and not in an ironic hipster way but because I no longer wash or engage with the world, and it’s like: my God, did you not get yourself together already?

When I left appointments and saw the long-term patients, walking around in hospital-issue pyjamas, dead-eyed (the kind of image of the mentally ill that has become anathema to refer to as part of the conversation, but which in some cases is accurate), four emotions rushed in: empathy, sympathy, recognition, terror. It’s one of those things you can’t really talk about with authenticity unless you’ve seen it, not really: the aurora borealis, Prince playing live and the inpatient wards.

Maybe my prognosis will look up, maybe I’ll leave it all behind. I’ve noticed a recent thing is for people to declare themselves “proud” of their mental illness. I guess I don’t understand this. It does not define me.

It’s not something that, when stable, I feel ashamed of, or that I hide. But I am not proud of it. I’d rather I didn’t have it – so I wasn’t exhausted, so I wasn’t bitter about it – despite the fact that I know some people, in all parts of the world, are infinitely worse off.

I want it gone, so that I am not dealing with it all the time, or worrying about others having to deal with it all the time. So I don’t have to read another article, or poster, about how I just need to ask for help. So that when a campaigner on Twitter says, “To anyone feeling ashamed of being depressed: there is nothing to be ashamed of. It’s illness. Like asthma or measles”, I don’t have to grit my teeth and say, actually, I am not OK, and mental illness couldn’t be less like measles. So that when someone else moans about being bored with everyone talking about mental health, and a different campaigner replies, “People with mental illness aren’t bored with it!” I don’t have to say, no, I am: I am bored with this Conversation. Because more than talking about it, I want to get better. I want to live.

Musean Hypernumbers

archive.is |  Musean hypernumbers are an algebraic concept envisioned by Charles A. Musès (1919–2000) to form a complete, integrated, connected, and natural number system.^{[1][2][3][4][5]} Musès sketched certain fundamental types of hypernumbers and arranged them in ten "levels", each with its own associated arithmetic and geometry.

Mostly criticized for lack of mathematical rigor and unclear defining relations, Musean hypernumbers are often perceived as an unfounded mathematical speculation. This impression was not helped by Musès' outspoken confidence in applicability to fields far beyond what one might expect from a number system, including consciousness, religion, and metaphysics.

The term "M-algebra" was used by Musès for investigation into a subset of his hypernumber concept (the 16 dimensional conic sedenions and certain subalgebras thereof), which is at times confused with the Musean hypernumber level concept itself. The current article separates this well-understood "M-algebra" from the remaining controversial hypernumbers, and lists certain applications envisioned by the inventor.

"M-algebra" and "hypernumber levels"[edit]

Musès was convinced that the basic laws of arithmetic on the reals are in direct correspondence with a concept where numbers could be arranged in "levels", where fewer arithmetical laws would be applicable with increasing level number.^[3] However, this concept was not developed much further beyond the initial idea, and defining relations for most of these levels have not been constructed.

Higher-dimensional numbers built on the first three levels were called "M-algebra"^[6][7] by Musès if they yielded a distributive multiplication, unit element, and multiplicative norm. It contains kinds of octonions and historical quaternions (except A. MacFarlane's hyperbolic quaternions) as subalgebras. A proof of completeness of M-algebra has not been provided.

Conic sedenions / "16 dimensional M-algebra"[edit]

The term "M-algebra" (after C. Musès^[6]) refers to number systems that are vector spaces over the reals, whose bases consist in roots of −1 or +1, and which possess a multiplicative modulus. While the idea of such numbers was far from new and contains many known isomorphic number systems (like e.g. split-complex numbers or tessarines), certain results from 16 dimensional (conic) sedenions were a novelty. Musès demonstrated the existence of a logarithm and real powers in number systems built to non-real roots of +1.

 

Even Given Eyes To See, We Know Nothing About What We're Looking At...,

cheniere  |  In the light of other past researches, we were very much attracted when we first saw his typescript last year, by the author's perceptive treatment of the operational‑theoretic significance of measurement, in relation to the broader question of the meaning of negative entropy. Several years ago ¹ we had constructed a pilot model of an electro‑mechanical machine we described as the Critical Probability Sequence Calculator, designed and based on considerations stemming from the mathematical principles of a definite discipline which we later² called chronotopology: the topological (not excluding quantitative relations) and most generalized analysis of the temporal process, of all time series ‑ the science of time so to speak. To use a popular word in a semi‑popular sense, the CPSC was a 'time‑machine,' as its input data consist solely of known past times, and its output solely of most probable future times. That is, like the Hamiltonian analysis of action in this respect, its operation was concerned only with more general quantities connected with the structure of the temporal process itself, rather than with the nature of the particular events or occurrences involved or in question, although it can tell us many useful things about those events. However, as an analogue computer, it was built simply to demonstrate visibly the operation of interdependences already much more exactly stated as chronotopological relationships.

That situations themselves should have general laws of temporal structure, quite apart from their particular contents, is a conclusion that must be meaningful to the working scientist; for it is but a special example of the truth of scientific abstraction, and a particularly understandable one in the light of the modern theory of games, which is a discipline that borders on chronotopology.

One of the bridges from ordinary physics to chronotopology is the bridge on which Rothstein's excellent analyses also lie: the generalized conception of entropy. And in some of what follows we will summarize what we wrote in 1951 in the paper previously referred to, and in other places. We will dispense with any unnecessary apologies for the endeavor to make the discussion essentially understandable to the intelligent layman.

Modern studies in communication theory (and communications are perhaps the heart of our present civilization) involve time series in a manner basic to their assumptions. A great deal of 20th century interest is centering on the more and more exact use and measurement of time intervals. Ours might be epitomized as the Century of Time‑for only since the 1900's has so much depended on split‑second timing and the accurate measurement of that timi ng in fields ranging from electronics engineering to fast‑lens photography.

Another reflection of the importance of time in our era is the emphasis on high speeds, i.e. minimum time intervals for action, and thus more effected in less time. Since power can be measured by energy‑release per time‑unit, the century of time becomes, and so it has proved, the Century of Power. To the responsible thinker such an equation is fraught with profound and significant consequences for both science and humanity. Great amounts of energy delivered in minimal times demand

a) extreme accuracy of knowledge and knowledgeapplication concerning production of the phenomena,

b) full understanding of the nature and genesis of the phenomena involved; since at such speeds and at such amplitudes of energy a practically irrevocable, quite easily disturbing set of consequences is assured. That we have mastered (a) more than (b) deserves at least this parenthetical mention. And yet there is a far‑reaching connection between the two, whereby any more profound knowledge will inevitably lead in turn to a sounder basis for actions stemming from that knowledge.

No longer is it enough simply to take time for granted and merely apportion and program it in a rather naively arbitrary fashion. Time must be analyzed, and its nature probed for whatever it may reveal in the way of determinable sequences of critical probabilities. The analysis of time per se is due to become, in approximate language, quite probably a necessity for us as a principal mode of attack by our science on its own possible shortcomings. For with our present comparatively careening pace of technical advance and action, safety factors, emergent from a thorough study and knowledge of the nature of this critical quantity 'time,' are by that very nature most enabled to be the source of what is so obviously lacking in our knowledge on so many advanced levels: adequate means of controlling consequences and hence direction of advance.

Chronotopology (deriving from Chronos + topos + logia) is the study of the intra‑connectivity of time (including the inter‑connectivity of time points and intervals), the nature or structure of time, 0 if you will; how it is contrived in its various ways of formation and how those structures function, in operation and interrelation.

It is simple though revealing, and it is practically important to the development of our subject, to appreciate that seconds, minutes, days, years, centuries, et al., are not time, but merely the measures of time; that they are no more time than rulers are what they measure. Of the nature and structure of time itself investigations have been all but silent. As with many problems lying at the foundations of our thought and procedures, it has been taken for granted and thereby neglected ‑ as for centuries before the advent mathematical logic were the foundations of arithmetic. The "but" in the above phrase "investigations have been all but silent” conveys an indirect point. As science has advanced, time has had to be used increasingly as a paramimplicitly (as in the phase spaces of statistical mechanics) or explicitly.

Birkhoff's improved enunciation of the ergodic problem ³ actually was one of a characteristic set of modern efforts to associate a structure with time in a formulated manner. Aside from theoretical interest, those efforts have obtained a wide justification in practice and in terms of the greater analytic power they conferred. They lead directly to chronotopological conceptions as their ideational destination and basis.

The discovery of the exact formal congruence of a portion of the theory of probability (that for stochastic processes) with a portion of the theory of general dynamics is another significant outcome of those efforts. Such a congr        uence constitutes more or less suggestion that probability theory has been undergoing, ever since its first practical use as the theory of probable errors by astronomy, a gradual metamorphosis into the actual study of governing time‑forces and their configurations, into chronotopology. And the strangely privileged character of the time parameter in quantum mechanics is well known – another fact pointing in the same direction.

Now Birkhoff's basic limit theorem may be analyzed as a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, since all possible states of change of a given system will become exhausted with increase of entropy ⁴ as time proceeds. It is to the credit of W.. S. Franklin to have been the first  specifically to point out ⁵ that the second law of thermodynamics "relates to the inevitable forward movement which we call time"; not clock‑time, however, but time more clearly exhibiting its nature, and measured by what Eddington has termed an entropy‑clock ⁶. When we combine this fact with the definition of increase of entropy established by Boltzmann, Maxwell, and Gibbs as progression from less to more probable states, we can arrive at a basic theorem in chronotopology:

T₁, The movement of time is an integrated movement toward regions of ever‑increasing probability.

Corollary: It is thus a selective movement in a sense to be determined by a more accurate understanding of probability, and in what 'probability' actually consists in any given situation.

This theorem, supported by modern thermodynamic theory, indicates that it would no longer be correct for the Kantian purely subjective view of time entirely to dominate modern scientific thinking, as it has thus far tended to do since Mach. Rather, a truer balance of viewpoint is indicated whereby time, though subjectively effective too, nevertheless possesses definite structural and functional characteristics which can be formulated quantitatively. We shall eventually see that time may be defined as the ultimate causal pattern of all energy‑release and that this release is of an oscillatory nature. To put it more popularly, there are time waves.

Flatlanders Squinting At The Connectome

edge |  Because we use the word queen—the Egyptians use the word king—we have a misconception of the role of the queen in the society. The queen is usually the only reproductive in a honey bee colony. She’s specialized entirely to that reproductive role. It’s not that she’s any way directing the society; it’s more accurate to say that the behavior and activity of the queen is directed by the workers. The queen is essentially an egg-laying machine. She is fed unlimited high-protein, high-carbohydrate food by the nurse bees that tend to her. She is provided with an array of perfectly prepared cells to lay eggs in. She will lay as many eggs as she can, and the colony will raise as many of those eggs as they can in the course of the day. But the queen is not ruling the show. She only flies once in her life. She will leave the hive on a mating flight; she’ll be mated by up to twenty male bees, in the case of the honey bee, and then she stores that semen for the rest of her life. That is the role of the queen. She is the reproductive, but she is not the ruler of the colony.

Many societies have attached this sense of royalty, and I think that as much reflects that we see the order inside the honey bee society and we assume that there must be some sort of structure that maintains that order. We see this one individual who is bigger and we anthropomorphize that that somehow must be their leader. But no, there is no way that it’s appropriate to say that the queen has any leadership role in a honey bee society.

A honey bee queen would live these days two to three years, and it's getting shorter. It’s not that long ago that if you read the older books, they would report that queens would live up to seven years. We’re not seeing queens last that long now. It’s more common for queens to be replaced every two to three years. All the worker honey bees are female and the queen is female—it’s a matriarchal society.

An even more recent and exciting revolution happening now is this connectomic revolution, where we’re able to map in exquisite detail the connections of a part of the brain, and soon even an entire insect brain. It’s giving us absolute answers to questions that we would have debated even just a few years ago; for example, does the insect brain work as an integrated system? And because we now have a draft of a connectome for the full insect brain, we can absolutely answer that question. That completely changes not just the questions that we’re asking, but our capacity to answer questions. There’s a whole new generation of questions that become accessible.

When I say a connectome, what I mean is an absolute map of the neural connections in a brain. That’s not a trivial problem. It's okay at one level to, for example with a light microscope, get a sense of the structure of neurons, to reconstruct some neurons and see where they go, but knowing which neurons connect with other neurons requires another level of detail. You need electron microscopy to look at the synapses.

The main question I’m asking myself at the moment is about the nature of the animal mind, and how minds and conscious minds evolved. The perspective I’m taking on that is to try to examine the mind's mechanisms of behavior in organisms that are far simpler than ours.

I’ve got a particular focus on insects, specifically on the honey bee. For me, it remains a live question as to whether we can think of the honey bee as having any kind of mind, or if it's more appropriate to think of it as something more mechanistic, more robotic. I tend to lean towards thinking of the honey bee as being a conscious agent, certainly a cognitively effective agent. That’s the biggest question I’m exploring for myself.

There’s always been an interest in animals, natural history, and animal behavior. Insects have always had this particular point of tension because they are unusually inaccessible compared to so many other animals. When we look at things like mammals and dogs, we are so drawn to empathize with them that it tends to mask so much. When we’re looking at something like an insect, they’re doing so much, but their faces are completely expressionless and their bodies are completely alien to ours. They operate on a completely different scale. You cannot empathize or emote. It’s not immediately clear what they are, whether they’re an entity or whether they’re a mechanism.

Are Space And Time Quantized?

Forbes |  Throughout the history of science, one of the prime goals of making sense of the Universe has been to discover what's fundamental. Many of the things we observe and interact with in the modern, macroscopic world are composed of, and can be derived from, smaller particles and the underlying laws that govern them. The idea that everything is made of elements dates back thousands of years, and has taken us from alchemy to chemistry to atoms to subatomic particles to the Standard Model, including the radical concept of a quantum Universe.

But even though there's very good evidence that all of the fundamental entities in the Universe are quantum at some level, that doesn't mean that everything is both discrete and quantized. So long as we still don't fully understand gravity at a quantum level, space and time might still be continuous at a fundamental level. Here's what we know so far.

Quantum mechanics is the idea that, if you go down to a small enough scale, everything that contains energy, whether it's massive (like an electron) or massless (like a photon), can be broken down into individual quanta. You can think of these quanta as energy packets, which sometimes behave as particles and other times behave as waves, depending on what they interact with.

Everything in nature obeys the laws of quantum physics, and our "classical" laws that apply to larger, more macroscopic systems can always (at least in theory) be derived, or emerge, from the more fundamental quantum rules. But not everything is necessarily discrete, or capable of being divided into a localized region space.

The energy level differences in Lutetium-177. Note how there are only specific, discrete energy levels that are acceptable. While the energy levels are discrete, the positions of the electrons are not.

If you have a conducting band of metal, for example, and ask "where is this electron that occupies the band," there's no discreteness there. The electron can be anywhere, continuously, within the band. A free photon can have any wavelength and energy; no discreteness there. Just because something is quantized, or fundamentally quantum in nature, doesn't mean everything about it must be discrete.

The idea that space (or space and time, since they're inextricably linked by Einstein's theories of relativity) could be quantized goes way back to Heisenberg himself. Famous for the Uncertainty Principle, which fundamentally limits how precisely we can measure certain pairs of quantities (like position and momentum), Heisenberg realized that certain quantities diverged, or went to infinity, when you tried to calculate them in quantum field theory.

Cognitive Enhancement In The Context Of Neurodiversity And Psychopathology

ama-assn |  In the basement of the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) headquarters in Sevres, France, a suburb of Paris, there lies a piece of metal that has been secured since 1889 in an environmentally controlled chamber under three bell jars. It represents the world standard for the kilogram, and all other kilo measurements around the world must be compared and calibrated to this one prototype. There is no such standard for the human brain. Search as you might, there is no brain that has been pickled in a jar in the basement of the Smithsonian Museum or the National Institute of Health or elsewhere in the world that represents the standard to which all other human brains must be compared. Given that this is the case, how do we decide whether any individual human brain or mind is abnormal or normal? To be sure, psychiatrists have their diagnostic manuals. But when it comes to mental disorders, including autism, dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, intellectual disabilities, and even emotional and behavioral disorders, there appears to be substantial uncertainty concerning when a neurologically based human behavior crosses the critical threshold from normal human variation to pathology.

A major cause of this ambiguity is the emergence over the past two decades of studies suggesting that many disorders of the brain or mind bring with them strengths as well as weaknesses. People diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), for example, appear to have strengths related to working with systems (e.g., computer languages, mathematical systems, machines) and in experiments are better than control subjects at identifying tiny details in complex patterns [1]. They also score significantly higher on the nonverbal Raven’s Matrices intelligence test than on the verbal Wechsler Scales [2]. A practical outcome of this new recognition of ASD-related strengths is that technology companies have been aggressively recruiting people with ASD for occupations that involve systemizing tasks such as writing computer manuals, managing databases, and searching for bugs in computer code [3].

Valued traits have also been identified in people with other mental disorders. People with dyslexia have been found to possess global visual-spatial abilities, including the capacity to identify “impossible objects” (of the kind popularized by M. C. Escher) [4], process low-definition or blurred visual scenes [5], and perceive peripheral or diffused visual information more quickly and efficiently than participants without dyslexia [6]. Such visual-spatial gifts may be advantageous in jobs requiring three-dimensional thinking such as astrophysics, molecular biology, genetics, engineering, and computer graphics [7, 8]. In the field of intellectual disabilities, studies have noted heightened musical abilities in people with Williams syndrome, the warmth and friendliness of individuals with Down syndrome, and the nurturing behaviors of persons with Prader-Willi syndrome [9, 10]. Finally, researchers have observed that subjects with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder display greater levels of novelty-seeking and creativity than matched controls [11-13].

Such strengths may suggest an evolutionary explanation for why these disorders are still in the gene pool. A growing number of scientists are suggesting that psychopathologies may have conferred specific evolutionary advantages in the past as well as in the present [14]. The systemizing abilities of individuals with autism spectrum disorder might have been highly adaptive for the survival of prehistoric humans. As autism activist Temple Grandin, who herself has autism, surmised: “Some guy with high-functioning Asperger’s developed the first stone spear; it wasn’t developed by the social ones yakking around the campfire” [15].

Divisive Politics – What Does Neuroscience Tell Us?

weforum | Neuroscience has offered some evidence-based claims that can be uncomfortable because they challenge our notions of morality or debunk the myth about our ‘rational’ brain.

Critically, neuroscience has enlightened us about the physicality of human emotions. Fear, an emotion we have inherited from our ancestors, is not an abstract or intangible sense of imminent danger: it is expressed in neurochemical terms in our amygdala, the almond-shaped structure on the medial temporal lobe, anterior to the hippocampus. The amygdala has been demonstrated to be critical in the acquisition, storage and expression of conditioned fear responses. Certain regions in the amygdala undergo plasticity – changes in response to emotional stimuli – triggering other reactions, including endocrine responses.

Similarly, the way our brains produce moral reasoning and then translate it in the social context can now be studied to some extent in neuroscientific terms. For instance, the role of serotonin in prosocial behaviour and moral judgment is now well documented, with a demonstrably strong correlation between levels of serotonin in the brain and moral social behaviour.

Neuroscientists have also looked at how political ideologies are represented in the brain; preliminary research indicates that an increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex can be correlated with inclinations towards liberalism, while increased gray matter volume in the amygdala (which is part of the limbic system and thus concerned with emotions) appears to be associated with conservative values. These early findings, of course, are not meant to be reductionist, deterministic, or politically pigeonhole one group or the other, nor are they fixed. Rather, they can help explain the deep and persistent divide that we see in party politics across the world. It would very valuable to look into whether these preliminary findings pre-date political affiliation or occur as a result of repeated exposure to politically-inspired partisan and emotional debates.

Source: Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults Report

More recently, policy analysis has turned to neuroscience too. For example, in the US 2016 election cycle, some have correlated the appeal of some candidates to the so-called hardwiring in our brains, and to our primordial needs of group belonging, while others have explored the insights from neuroscience on the role of emotions in decision-making. Similarly, the attitudes surrounding “Brexit” have also been analysed with references from neuroscience.

Divisive politics – what does neuroscience tell us?

The short answer is: some useful new insights. To be sure, some findings in neuroscience might be crude at this stage as the discipline and its tools are evolving. The human brain – despite tremendous scientific advances – remains to a large extent unknown. We do have, however, some preliminary findings to draw on. Divisive politics have taken centre stage and neuroscience may be able shed some light on how this is expressed in our brains.

“Us” vs. “them”, cultivating fear and hatred towards out-groups that are deemed different (ethnically, ideologically, religiously, etc.), and vicious and virulent attacks against them, are all part of an unsettling picture of growing ethnic and racial hostility. Philosopher Martin Buber identified two opposed ways of being in relation to others: I-It and I-thou. I-It means perceiving others as objects, whereas I-thou refers to empathic perceptions of others as subjects. Cognitive neuroscientists have studied this distinction with brain imaging techniques and the findings – unsurprisingly – tell us a lot about our increasingly polarised world today and the ways our brains process the distinction between us and “others”.

Did Autistic Attention To Detail And Collaborative Morality Drive Human Evolution?

tandfonline |  Selection pressures to better understand others’ thoughts and feelings are seen as a primary driving force in human cognitive evolution. Yet might the evolution of social cognition be more complex than we assume, with more than one strategy towards social understanding and developing a positive pro-social reputation? Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others’ thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. ‘Traits of autism’ may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependence of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks.

physorg | The ability to focus on detail, a common trait among people with autism, allowed realism to flourish in Ice Age art, according to researchers at the University of York. 

Around 30,000 years ago realistic art suddenly flourished in Europe. Extremely accurate depictions of bears, bison, horses and lions decorate the walls of Ice Age archaeological sites such as Chauvet Cave in southern France.

Why our ice age ancestors created exceptionally realistic art rather than the very simple or stylised art of earlier modern humans has long perplexed researchers.

Many have argued that psychotropic drugs were behind the detailed illustrations. The popular idea that drugs might make people better at art led to a number of ethically-dubious studies in the 60s where participants were given art materials and LSD.

The authors of the new study discount that theory, arguing instead that individuals with "detail focus", a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe.

The ability to focus on detail, a common trait among people with autism, allowed realism to flourish in Ice Age art, according to researchers at the University of York.
Around 30,000 years ago realistic art suddenly flourished in Europe. Extremely accurate depictions of bears, bison, horses and lions decorate the walls of Ice Age archaeological sites such as Chauvet Cave in southern France.
Why our ice age ancestors created exceptionally realistic art rather than the very simple or stylised art of earlier modern humans has long perplexed researchers.
Many have argued that psychotropic drugs were behind the detailed illustrations. The popular idea that drugs might make people better at art led to a number of ethically-dubious studies in the 60s where participants were given art materials and LSD.
The authors of the new study discount that theory, arguing instead that individuals with "detail focus", a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe.

The Wizard of Q (Gaming Autistic Incels For Fun And Political Profit)

Harpers |  I concluded that the internet and the novel were natural enemies. “Choose your own adventure” stories were not the future of literature. The author should be a dictator, a tyrant who treated the reader as his willing slave, not as a cocreator. And high-tech flourishes should be avoided. Novels weren’t meant to link to Neil Diamond songs or, say, refer to real plane crashes on the day they happen. Novels were closed structures, their boundaries fixed, not data-driven, dynamic feedback loops. Until quite recently, these were my beliefs, and no new works emerged to challenge my thinking.

Then, late last year, while knocking around on the internet one night, I came across a long series of posts originally published on 4chan, an anonymous message board. They described a sinister global power struggle only dimly visible to ordinary citizens. On one side of the fight, the posts explained, was a depraved elite, bound by unholy oaths and rituals, secretly sowing chaos and strife to create a pretext for their rule. On the other side was the public, we the people, brave and decent but easily deceived, not least because the news was largely scripted by the power brokers and their collaborators in the press. And yet there was hope, I read, because the shadow directorate had blundered. Aligned during the election with Hillary Clinton and unable to believe that she could lose, least of all to an outsider, it had underestimated Donald Trump—as well as the patriotism of the US military, which had recruited him for a last-ditch battle against the psychopathic deep-state spooks. The writer of the 4chan posts, who signed these missives “Q,” invited readers to join this battle. He—she? it?—promised to pass on orders from a commander and intelligence gathered by a network of spies.

I was hooked.

Known to its fan base as ­QAnon, the tale first appeared last year, around Halloween. Q’s literary brilliance wasn’t obvious at first. His obsessions were unoriginal, his style conventional, even dull. He suggested that Washington was being purged of globalist evildoers, starting with Clinton, who was awaiting arrest, supposedly, but allowed to roam free for reasons that weren’t clear. Soon a whole roster of villains had emerged, from John ­McCain to John Podesta to former president Obama, all of whom were set to be destroyed by something called the Storm, an allusion to a remark by President Trump last fall about “the calm before the storm.” Clinton’s friend and supporter Lynn Forrester de Roth­schild, a member by marriage of the banking family abhorred by anti-Semites everywhere, came in for special abuse from Q and Co.—which may have contributed to her decision to delete her Twitter app. Along with George Soros, numerous other bigwigs, the FBI, the CIA, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (by whom the readers of Q feel persecuted), these figures composed a group called the Cabal. The goal of the Cabal was dominion over all the earth. Its initiates tended to be pedophiles (or pedophilia apologists), the better to keep them blackmailed and in line, and its esoteric symbols were everywhere; the mainstream media served as its propaganda arm. Oh, and don’t forget the pope.

As I read further, the tradition in which Q was working became clearer. Q’s plot of plots is a retread, for the most part, of Cold War–era John Birch Society notions found in books such as None Dare Call It Conspiracy. These Bircher ideas were borrowings, in turn, from the works of a Georgetown University history professor by the name of Carroll Quigley. Said to be an important influence on Bill Clinton, Quigley was a legitimate scholar of twentieth-century Anglo-American politics. His 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, which concerned the power held by certain elites over social and military planning in the West, is not itself a paranoid creation, but parts of it have been twisted and reconfigured to support wild theories of all kinds. Does Q stand for Quigley? It’s possible, though there are other possibilities (such as the Department of Energy’s “Q” security clearance). The literature of right-wing political fear has a canon and a pantheon, and Q, whoever he is, seems deeply versed in it.

While introducing his cast of fiends, Q also assembled a basic story line. Justice was finally coming for the Cabal, whose evil deeds were “mind blowing,” Q wrote, and could never be “fully exposed” lest they touch off riots and revolts. But just in case this promised “Great Awakening” caused panic in the streets, the National Guard and the Marine Corps were ready to step in. So were panels of military judges, in whose courts the treasonous cabalists would be tried and convicted, then sent to Guantánamo. In the manner of doomsayers since time began, Q hinted that Judgment Day was imminent and seemed unabashed when it kept on not arriving. Q knew full well that making one’s followers wait for a definitive, cathartic outcome is a cult leader’s best trick—for the same reason that it’s a novelist’s best trick. Suspense is an irritation that’s also a pleasure, so there’s a sensual payoff from these delays. And the more time a devotee invests in pursuing closure and satisfaction, the deeper her need to trust the person in charge. It’s why Trump may be in no hurry to build his wall, or to finish it if he starts. It’s why he announced a military parade that won’t take place until next fall.

As the posts piled up and Q’s plot thickened, his writing style changed. It went from discursive to interrogative, from concise and direct to gnomic and suggestive. This was the breakthrough, the hook, the innovation, and what convinced me Q was a master, not just a prankster or a kook. He’d discovered a principle of online storytelling that had eluded me all those years ago but now seemed obvious: The audience for internet narratives doesn’t want to read, it wants to write. It doesn’t want answers provided, it wants to search for them. It doesn’t want to sit and be amused, it wants to be sent on a mission. It wants to do.

Weaponized Autism: Fin d'Siecle Programmer's Stone

melmagazine |  We know that people on the spectrum can exhibit remarkable mental gifts in addition to their difficulties; Asperger syndrome has been associated with superior IQs that reach up to the “genius” threshold (4chan trolls use “aspie” and “autist” interchangeably). In practice, weaponized autism is best understood as a perversion of these hidden advantages. Think, for example, of the keen pattern recognition that underlies musical talent repurposed for doxxing efforts: Among the more “successful” deployments of weaponized autism, in the alt-right’s view, was a collective attempt to identify an antifa demonstrator who assaulted several of their own with a bike lock at a Berkeley rally this past April.

As Berkeleyside reported, “the amateur detectives” of 4chan’s /pol/ board went about “matching up his perceived height and hairline with photos of people at a previous rally and on social media,” ultimately claiming that Eric Clanton, a former professor at Diablo Valley College, was the assailant in question. Arrested and charged in May, Clanton faces a preliminary hearing this week, and has condemned the Berkeley PD for relying on the conjecture of random assholes. “My case threatens to set a new standard in which rightwing extremists can select targets for repression and have police enthusiastically and forcefully pursue them,” he wrote in a statement.

The denizens of /pol/, meanwhile, are terribly proud of their work, and fellow Trump boosters have used their platforms to applaud it. Conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec called it a new form of “facial recognition,” as if it were in any way forensic, and lent credence to another dubious victory for the forces of weaponized autism: supposed coordination with the Russian government to take out ISIS camps in Syria. 4chan users are now routinely deconstructing raw videos of terrorist training sites and the like to make estimations about where they are, then sending those findings to the Russian Ministry of Defense’s Twitter account. There is zero reason to believe, as Posobiec and others contend, that 4chan has ever “called in an airstrike,” nor that Russia even bothered to look at the meager “intel” offered, yet the aggrandizing myth persists.

Since “autistic” has become a catchall idiom on 4chan, the self-defined mentality of anyone willing to spend time reading and contributing to the site, it’s impossible to know how many users are diagnosed with the condition, or could be, or earnestly believe that it correlates to their own experience, regardless of professional medical opinion. They tend to assume, at any rate, that autistic personalities are readily drawn to the board as introverted, societal misfits in search of connection. The badge of “autist” conveys the dueling attitudes of pride and loathing at work in troll communities: They may be considered and sometimes feel like failures offline — stereotyped as sexless, jobless and immature — but this is because they are different, transgressive, in a sense better, elevated from the realm of polite, neurotypical normies. Their handicap is a virtue.

Normotic Illness Culture: Programming the Social Validation Feedback Loop

CounterPunch |  Sitting alone in my room watching videos on Youtube, hearing sounds from across the hall of my roommate watching Netflix, the obvious point occurs to me that a key element of the demonic genius of late capitalism is to enforce a crushing passiveness on the populace. With social atomization comes collective passiveness—and with collective passiveness comes social atomization. The product (and cause) of this vicious circle is the dying society of the present, in which despair can seem to be the prevailing condition. With an opioid epidemic raging and, more generally, mental illness affecting 50 percent of Americans at some point in their lifetime, it’s clear that the late-capitalist evisceration of civil society has also eviscerated, on a broad scale, the individual’s sense of self-worth. We have become atoms, windowless monads buffeted by bureaucracies, desperately seeking entertainment as a tonic for our angst and ennui.

The old formula of the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott is as relevant as it always will be: “It is creative apperception more than anything that makes the individual feel that life is worth living.” If so many have come to feel alienated from life itself, that is largely because they don’t feel creative, free, or active.......

 

Noam Chomsky, in the tradition of Marx, is fond of saying that technology is “neutral,”neither beneficent nor baleful in itself but only in the context of particular social relations, but I’m inclined to think television is a partial exception to that dictum. I recall the Calvin and Hobbes strip in which, while sitting in front of a TV, Calvin says, “I try to make television-watching a complete forfeiture of experience. Notice how I keep my jaw slack, so my mouth hangs open. I try not to swallow either, so I drool, and I keep my eyes half-focused, so I don’t use any muscles at all. I take a passive entertainment and extend the passivity to my entire being. I wallow in my lack of participation and response. I’m utterly inert.” Where before one might have socialized outside, gone to a play, or discussed grievances with fellow workers and strategized over how to resolve them, now one could stay at home and watch a passively entertaining sitcom that imbued one with the proper values of consumerism, wealth accumulation, status-consciousness, objectification of women, subordination to authority, lack of interest in politics, and other “bourgeois virtues.” The more one cultivated a relationship with the television, the less one cultivated relationships with people—or with one’s creative capacities, which “more than anything else make the individual feel that life is worth living.”

Television is the perfect technology for a mature capitalist society, and has surely been of inestimable value in keeping the population relatively passive and obedient—distracted, idle, incurious, separated yet conformist. Doubtless in a different kind of society it could have a somewhat more elevated potential—programming could be more edifying, devoted to issues of history, philosophy, art, culture, science—but in our own society, in which institutions monomaniacally fixated on accumulating profit and discouraging critical thought (because it’s dangerous) have control of it, the outcome is predictable. The average American watches about five hours of TV a day, while 60 percent of Americans have subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Sixty-five percent of homes have three or more TV sets.

Movie-watching, too, is an inherently passive pastime. Theodor Adorno remarked, “Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before.” To sit in a movie theater (or at home) with the lights out, watching electronic images flit by, hearing blaring noises from huge surround-sound speakers, is to experience a kind of sensory overload while being almost totally inactive. And then the experience is over and you rub your eyes and try to become active and whole again. It’s different from watching a play, where the performers are present in front of you, the art is enacted right there organically and on a proper human scale, there is no sensory overload, no artificial splicing together of fleeting images, no glamorous cinematic alienation from your own mundane life.

Since the 1990s, of course, electronic media have exploded to the point of utterly dominating our lives. For example, 65 percent of U.S. households include someone who plays video games regularly. Over three-quarters of Americans own a smartphone, which, from anecdotal observation, we know tends to occupy an immense portion of their time. The same proportion has broadband internet service at home, and 70 percent of Americans use social media. As an arch-traditionalist, I look askance at all this newfangled electronic technology (even as I use it constantly). It seems to me that electronic mediation of human relationships, and of life itself, is inherently alienating and destructive, insofar as it atomizes or isolates. There’s something anti-humanistic about having one’s life be determined by algorithms (algorithms invented and deployed, in many cases, by private corporations). And the effects on mental functioning are by no means benign: studies have confirmed the obvious, that “the internet may give you an addict’s brain,” “you may feel more lonely and jealous,” and “memory problems may be more likely” (apparently because of information overload). Such problems manifest a passive and isolated mode of experience.

But this is the mode of experience of neoliberalism, i.e., hyper-capitalism. After the upsurge of protest in the 1960s and early ’70s against the corporatist regime of centrist liberalism, the most reactionary sectors of big business launched a massive counterattack to destroy organized labor and the whole New Deal system, which was eating into their profits and encouraging popular unrest. The counterattack continues in 2018, and, as we know, has been wildly successful. The union membership rate in the private sector is a mere 6.5 percent, a little less than it was on the eve of the Great Depression, and the U.S. spends much less on social welfare than comparable OECD countries. Such facts have had predictable effects on the cohesiveness of the social fabric.