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Lots of very intelligent people are putting lots of effort into mapping the brain's networks. People are calling these sort of maps of which neuron is connected to which neuron 'connectomes', and if you're working on this stuff, you're doing 'connectomics'. (Academics love […]
Ken Jennings, on his match with IBM's Watson supercomputer: Indeed, playing against Watson turned out to be a lot like any other Jeopardy! game, though out of the corner of my eye I could see that the middle player had a plasma screen for a face. Watson has lots in common with a […]
From an interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky (the world's leading paranoid on the dangers of AI): Richard Hamming used to go around annoying his colleagues at Bell Labs by asking them what were the important problems in their field, and then, after they answered, he would ask why […]
TMS 'Sonar' for mapping brain region activity coupling Modern neuroscience is increasingly suggesting that a great deal of a person's personality, pathology, and cognitive approach is encoded into which of their brain regions are activity coupled together. That is to say, which […]
A friend of mine on difficult video games and accomplishment: Have you heard of the game NetHack? It’s been in continuous development for the last 20 years or so. It’s all text based graphics, very spartan in that sense, but those limited graphics make for extremely rich and […]
One of the most interesting things we're learning about pain is that both physical and emotional pain use the same parts of the brain. If someone feels the sting of rejection, most of the same circuits activate as if they'd stubbed their toe. Pain is pain, period, no matter […]
From the New York Time's Why Writers Belong Behind Bars : It’s wonderful that writers can access medieval manuscripts, Swahili dictionaries and collections of 19th century daguerreotypes at any moment. But the downside is that it’s almost impossible to finish a sentence without […]
Lately I've been looking into causal connections between brain states and pain/pleasure. I'm finding plenty of material on specifics such as nociceptors, gate circuits, correlative fMRI studies, and so forth, but there doesn't appear to be a lot of research, or even much […]
Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate, but you cannot at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot in the same gesture shake a […]
Many serious people are projecting that within ten to fifteen years we'll be able to start on a significant program of cognitive enhancement. To craft drugs, hormone cocktails, neurointerfaces, and neuroprotheses that will significantly make their users smarter and more capable, […]
