My book on consciousness
| My reviews of books
My seminar on Mind/Consciousness
| My seminar on History of Knowledge
Click here for the index of all years
December 2023
- Robin Franklin's team at Altos Labs has shown that RNA expression of the retroviral element RNLTR12-int is crucial for myelination, and myelin is crucial for complex vertebrate brains. It is likely that this element is derived from ancient viruses. (paper).
November 2023
October 2023
- A team led by Chad Bouton at Northwell Health has implanted microchips into the brain of a man living with paralysis and have developed algorithms to re-link his brain to his body and spinal cord (article)
September 2023
- The psychologists Abigail Blyler and Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania used ChatGPT to accurately analyze stream-of-consciousness thoughts of patients (paper).
- Dylan Wagner's team at the Ohio State University found that the medial prefrontal cortex of lonelier people blurs thoughts about real friends and fictional characters
paper).
- Uwe Rudolph's team at the University of Illinois showed that reducing somatostatin-positive neurons in the hippocampus of mice leads to a memory decline similar to the one of aging mice, possibly a clue on how to reverse memory decline.
paper).
August 2023
- Anders Garm's team at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark showed that the Jellyfish, which lack a central brain despite having 24 eyes, are able to learn complex behavior
paper).
July 2023
- Nicholas Chua's team at the Flatiron Institute mapped the early visual system of the Megaphragma viggianii wasp, the first time a visual system has been fully reconstructed at the synaptic level
paper).
June 2023
- Sabrina Turker's team from the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig in Germany discovered new brain regions that process language both in the cerebellum and below the cerebral cortex play.
paper).
May 2023
- Stephanie Lacour's team at EPFL in Switzerland demonstrated
a soft robot that can be placed into the skull through a tiny hole, which could be used for minimally invasive inspection of the brain and for implanting brain-computer interfaces.
paper).
April 2023
- Alexander Huth's team at Univ of Texas has created a system to translate fMRI signals into words using an A.I. language model. The language decoder provides a non-invasive way
(fMRI data, no electrodes) of translating "thoughts" (brain activity) into text.
paper).
March 2023
- Marta Zlatic's lab at the University of Cambridge has mapped the entire connectome of an entire brain of a small insect, for a total of 3016 neurons and 548,000 synapses (paper)
- Saeedeh Sadeghi at Cornell University studies the role of the heart in the experience of time and discovered the existence of temporal dilation or contraction in perception that are in synchrony with cardiac dynamics. And so the heart plays a role in cognitive functions, and one can speculate how other organs affect our perceptions (paper)
February 2023
- Women's brains are understudied. Clare McCormack of New York University, Bridget Callaghan of UCLA and Jodi Pawluski of University Rennes in France wrote about the changes that take place in a woman's brain during pregnancy (paper).
- Lena Smirnova in Thomas Hartung's lab at Johns Hopkins University is working on "biocomputer" powered by cells that have been grown in the lab to be identical to human brain cells. Hartung has been growing this artificial organoids since 2012 reprogramming cells from human skin into embryonic stem cells. The brain organoids contain about 50,000 artificial neurons, in theory enough to compete with the brain of a fruit fly (paper)
- David Loane's team at the Trinity Biomedical Sciences Institute has discovered that an accumulation of cellular debris impedes the work of the microglia, which is essential to prevent neurodegenerative disease, thus shedding new light on aging processes in the brain. The microglia are the brain's immune cells. (paper)
- David Holtzman at Washington University has discovered that T-cells might be a cause of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzhaimer's because microglia attracts T-cells into the brain, which seem to cause an increase in the brain protein tau, which is known to be closely linked to the second phase of Alzheimer's, when nerve cells die and the brain shrinks. Tau represents the subunit protein of one of the major hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease: the neurofibrillary tangles. The tau protein is found to be aggregated in many neurologic disorders, including Parkinson disease and Alzheimer's disease, as well as in traumatic brain injury and normal aging. (paper)
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January 2023
- Rachel Wilson's team at Harvard University is elucidanting how animals transform representations of body movement into representations of the world. Many animals can navigate toward a goal they cannot see, based on an internal representation of that goal within the brain’s spatial maps. These spatial maps are organized around attractors that are bidirectionally connected to the motor system. (paper)
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