quote:

Man,,can he speak in tongues. Whew! The man ROCKS. He once practically levitated my truck from a mudslick.

That's what I am saying, he imposes more patterns than the normal brain and extracts additional maening from them. It's possible he's right and the rest of us our wrong. That'd be hip.

The day he lifted the truck from the mud was the day after Kerry lost. We drove into beautiful late fall weather in the countryside listening to Edwards give a very consoling defeat speech. I think if Edwards had been front-runner, they would have won, poll fraud or no poll fraud.

Anyway, driving down a steep slope we found nasty mud at the bottom. I began driving back and forth in it, doing the tranny-flip-flop. Back and forth, getting a little higher each time. Then Jay started going off in his deep bell tones, more or less like Indy Jones chanting kali ma but way better. It's a gift.

And it locked in my concentration super tight, and I micro-managed that clutch and shift-stick and never gave up hope and we bit some deep chirt and got a boost and that was all we needed.

One of the groovier events of my life.

A few weeks back the TODAY show did a thing on bionics and cyberneural interfaces and implants et yadi ya. THey briefly mentioned a couple that claimed to be sharing some form of mindflow, vbut I never saw the follow-up.

Anyone hear about this thing>

quote:

Originally posted by kenmeer livermaile:
A few weeks back the TODAY show did a thing on bionics and cyberneural interfaces and implants et yadi ya. THey briefly mentioned a couple that claimed to be sharing some form of mindflow, vbut I never saw the follow-up.

Anyone hear about this thing>

Was that the day they revealed Katie Couric as a Stan Winston creation with a Jim Henson ghost-arm up her bum?

quote:

Was that the day they revealed Katie Couric as a Stan Winston creation with a Jim Henson ghost-arm up her bum?

See what happens when you fall asleep to Coast to Coast?

John Shirley's "Brainbow" post

"Ay, ay, there's no limiting code in nanobot assembler replication!"

quote:

Originally posted by Eric:
"Ay, ay, there's no limiting code in nanobot assembler replication!"

Sorry wrong thread. I moved it

You ^^^ went to a neuroscience conference, where is the news?

Heh, too busy for that... I'll just post some random pictures...

You aren't really a neurscientist are you? You're like one of their drug test cowboys, yeah?

quote:

Originally posted by UberDog:
You aren't really a neurscientist are you? You're like one of their drug test cowboys, yeah?

You got me!

Cool to see WTF DNA is making the news in a big way:

AAAS Science has named research into human genetic variation the 'Breakthrough of the Year' for 2007

The unveiling of the human genome almost 7 years ago cast the first faint light on our complete genetic makeup. Since then, each new genome sequenced and each new individual studied has illuminated our genomic landscape in ever more detail. In 2007, researchers came to appreciate the extent to which our genomes differ from person to person and the implications of this variation for deciphering the genetics of complex diseases and personal traits.
...
Even with most of the 3 billion DNA bases lined up in the right order, there was still much that researchers couldn't see in the newly sequenced human genome in 2001. Early comparative studies threw conserved regulatory regions, RNA genes, and other features into relief, bringing meaning to much of our genome, including the 98% that lies outside protein-coding regions. These and other studies, including a pilot study called ENCODE, completed this year, drove home how complex the genome is.

There are an estimated 15 million places along our genomes where one base can differ from one person or population to the next. By mid-2007, more than 3 million such locations, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), had been charted. Called the HapMap, this catalog has made the use of SNPs to track down genes involved in complex diseases--so-called genome-wide association studies--a reality. More than a dozen such studies were published this year.
...
Genomes can differ in many other ways. Bits of DNA ranging from a few to many thousands, even millions, of bases can get lost, added, or turned around in an individual's genome. Such revisions can change the number of copies of a gene or piece of regulatory DNA or jam two genes together, changing the genes'products or shutting them down. This year marked a tipping point, as researchers became aware that these changes, which can alter a genome in just a few generations, affect more bases than SNPs.

In one study, geneticists discovered 3600 so-called copy number variants among 95 individuals studied. Quite a few overlapped genes, including some implicated in our individuality--blood type, smell, hearing, taste, and metabolism, for example. Individual genomes differed in size by as many as 9 million bases. This fall, another group performed an extensive analysis using a technique, called paired-end mapping, that can quickly uncover even smaller structural variations.

These differences matter. One survey concluded that in some populations almost 20% of differences in gene activity are due to copy-number variants; SNPs account for the rest. People with high-starch diets--such as in Japan--have extra copies of a gene for a starch-digesting protein compared with members of hunting-gathering societies. By scanning the genomes of autistic and healthy children and their parents for copy-number variation, other geneticists have found that newly appeared DNA alterations pose a risk for autism.

New technologies that are slashing the costs of sequencing and genome analyses will make possible the simultaneous genome-wide search for SNPs and other DNA alterations in individuals. Already, the unexpected variation within one individual's published genome has revealed that we have yet to fully comprehend the degree to which our DNA differs from one person to the next. Such structural and genetic variety is truly the spice of our individuality.


Yeah.

Best wishes for a Happy 2008! Hope to be able to post more once my karoshi-ish deadlines are past.

Alright DIT is on the move.
Happy New Year!

I think I've forgotten that before.

quote:

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery, which is used to treat Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, is now being studied for its potential to treat a variety of conditions. A new study found that hypothalamic DBS performed in the treatment of a patient with morbid obesity unexpectedly evoked a sense of déjà vu and detailed personal memories...

Hey Eric, cool post. Finally got a chance to read it!

Thought this was interesting:

Evolution in your Brain
An interview with Gerald Edelman of the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego

Ani Patel and John Iversen have been studying rhythm and melody as a kind of royal road to speech. If you ask an individual to tap according to a metronome, and then you stop the metronome, we already know that the person will tap pretty much in sync, the right rhythm. But if you do the same thing with a blinking light—a person tapping his finger in time along with a light flashing in front of him—the person cannot keep the synchrony after the light stops flashing. Ani Patel and Evan Balaban studied what happens when you play a melody—not a song the person is familiar with but a diatonic melody—and record with MEG [magnetoencephalography, the recording of magnetic fields coming from electrical activity in the brain]. The brain converts the pattern of the pitch into a pattern in time. So you can actually see the shape of the melody on a computer screen using MEG. You see the contour of the melody. Humans, by the way, are the only species that can imitate and synchronize to any arbitrary pattern of sound. As far as we know, even birds can’t in the same way.

What does the understanding of auditory rhythm in the brain tell us about humans?

One of the consequences of that study is that music and language are much more closely related than people had previously thought based on clinical studies. One of the mysteries of evolutionary theory is: What is it that developed that gave us rhythm synchronization? We don’t really know.
...
What we do know is that there’s a big differentiation amongst the modalities like vision and hearing and touch but a deep connection between the hearing system and the motor system, which certainly relates to dance.


must...get...back to work

Amazing how self-sufficient dendrites are - they've got local mitochondria for powering the cellular machinery there, and also, it turns out, a way to not only locally assemble proteins but also control the structure of the proteins that are to be assembled there...


RNA-splicing-occurs-in-nerve-cell-dendrites

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have discovered that nerve-cell dendrites have the capacity to splice messenger RNA (pre-mRNA), a process once believed to only take place in the nucleus of cells.
In the nucleus of a mammalian cell, a gene is copied into mRNA, which possesses both exons (mature mRNA regions destined to code for proteins) and introns (non-coding regions). mRNA splicing works by cutting out introns and merging together the remaining exon pieces, resulting in an mRNA capable of being translated into a specific protein.

The vast array of proteins within the human body arises in part from the many ways that mRNAs can be spliced and reconnected. Specifically, splicing removes pieces of intron and exon regions from the RNA, with the resulting spliced RNA often being made into protein. Should the RNA have different exons spliced in and out of it, then different proteins can be made from this RNA.
...
Dendrites, which branch from the cell body of the neuron, play a key role in the communication between cells of the nervous system, allowing for many neurons to connect with each other to form a network. Dendrites detect the electrical and chemical signals transmitted to the neuron by the axons of other neurons. The synapse is the neuronal structure where this chemical connection is formed, and investigators surmise that the synapse is where learning and memory occur.

...
Protein diversity is a key aspect to the complexity of the central nervous system. Proteins are the workhorses of the cell and are generally responsible for insuring that cells function properly. When proteins interact with one another they can elicit specific physiological responses, including the generation and maintenance of memories. Changing protein identity, as can occur with splicing, can change the ability of the protein to interact with other proteins and therefore potentially change such physiological processes. With the dendrite being the initial site in the neuron where learning is thought to occur, the ability to create a diversity of mRNAs, through local splicing, and subsequent protein translation may permit exquisitely sensitive control of these cellular functions.

"The regulation and timing of the expression of proteins is what makes the central nervous system function," says Eberwine. The diversity and redundancy of the nervous-system proteins may serve to help maintain the system over a lifetime. However, failure in protein regulation or proper expression in neurons may give rise to cognitive dysfunction. "Most neurodegenerative and psychiatric illnesses exhibit dendrite dysfunction, therefore, the inability to properly generate spliced RNAs in dendrites or proteins may underlie aspects of these disease processes."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: DIT,

quote:

DIT
Ani Patel and John Iversen have been studying rhythm and melody as a kind of royal road to speech. If you ask an individual to tap according to a metronome, and then you stop the metronome, we already know that the person will tap pretty much in sync, the right rhythm.(...)

Interesting experiment. It makes me think of two traits in human communication: babies and parents adjusting their bodymovements in the turn-taking in dialouge. And the fact that we adjust speaking rate to the rate of the conversational partner. In my own field it raises some questions in the therapy for cluttering in how to reduce speaking rate most efficiently. Thanks DIT.

An elephant paints a self portrait.

quote:

Ani Patel and John Iversen have been studying rhythm and melody as a kind of royal road to speech. If you ask an individual to tap according to a metronome, and then you stop the metronome, we already know that the person will tap pretty much in sync, the right rhythm. But if you do the same thing with a blinking light—a person tapping his finger in time along with a light flashing in front of him—the person cannot keep the synchrony after the light stops flashing.

Out of sight, out of mind

Anyway, the first thought that comes to my mind is that auditory data long ago would have often been related to the sound of prey or predator's approach. Rhythm would play into this as a means of predicting proximity, ETA, type of critter, et cetera.

Aural pattern recognition.

Even more so in the dark when, presumably, the object of concern would more likely be a predator.

Sight is perceptually continuous, a smooth flow. Little rhythmic interpretation needed. Instead, static pattern recognition would be most needful for finding, and avoiding becoming, a meal. Camouflage recognition, that sort of thing.

Observe here how visual rhythm is created by static patterns:
Akiyoshi's Illusion Pages

And ponder how visual pattern recognition with slight movements (twitching muscles, breathing heaves, wind-moved leaves) would create a sense of motion just outside the fovea, as Akiyoshi's main page illusions does.

Just a thought or three...

quote:

Originally posted by Metro Dynamics:
An elephant paints a self portrait.

Oh my, you just made Long Tom's woman, Mollita, so happy. (She's deeply into animal rights. Was almost pushed over a cliff by geriatric Shriner dudes who were upset she took pictures of less-than-kind treatment of Shriner's Circus elephants. Hilarious story, really. They weren't trying to murder her, just mob impulse expressed through seriously aged dogmatic synapses.)