THYMOS
A newsletter of research on Consciousness, Mind and Life

by piero scaruffi

Researchers are welcome to submit news and articles about breakthroughs and events in the areas of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, neurobiology, artificial life, linguistics, neural networks, connectionism, cognitive psychology, mind, philosophy, psychology, consciousness. Email the editor at this Email address. Readers who would like to receive periodic news and updates on cognitive science, philosophy of mind, neurobiology, artificial intelligence, etc, are invited to register to my mailing list. 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 2015 We believe conspiracy theories because our brain is prewired to find causes to every accident November 2015 Karim Benchenane of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) creates false memories into a mouse's brain (original paper) October 2015 Zoran Nenadic and An Do at the University of California at Irvine attach an electroencephalograph device to the head of a paraplegyc man and make him walk. (UCI News) September 2015 The genes that control the circadian clock (Quanta Magazine) August 2015 New genes arise from junk DNA (Quanta Magazine) Thomas von Zglinicki of Newcastle University has identified biological processes that enable people to live to 100 (Newcastle Univ) Shlomo Wagner of the University of Haifa studies how emotions influence learning and memory (eLife) Kerrie Thomas's team at Cardiff's Biosciences and Neuroscience and Mental Health Research Institute proved that lost autobiographical memories are not really lost (Cardiff Univ) July 2015 Justin Blau of NYU's Department of Biology found that the principal s-LNv clock neurons (in the fruit fly Drosophila) might be the biological device that controls adaptation to seasons (New York University) Warren Ruder of Virginia Tech proved that bacteria can control a robot (Virginia Tech) A study by Nicolas Dumay at the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language confirms the importance of sleep for consolidating memories (University of York) Research by Elizabeth Kirk at the University of York is revealing the importance of conversation between mother and child for the future socialization of the child ("A mother's ability to tune-in to her baby's thoughts and feelings early on helps her child to learn to empathise with the mental lives of other people" later on). A study by Nicolas Dumay at the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language confirms the importance of sleep for consolidating memories (Science daily) A discussion on Greenfield's "Mind Change" (Guardian) Vincent Ferrera at Columbia University's Medical Center found that the human brain is uniquely equipped among animals with the brain circuitry that allows for attention, a combination of the dorsal attention network and ventral attention network (Neuroscience News) Roger Seymour's at the University of Adelaide (Australia) showed that intelligence in animal species can be estimated by the size of the holes in the skull through which the arteries pass (Neuroscience News) Jody Tanabe's team at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine found that drug abuse has long-term effects on the volume of the female brain (Science Daily) Research led by Charlene Krueger, an associate professor at the University of Florida's College of Nursing has found evidence of learning and memory in fetuses six weeks prior to birth (Developmental Science) Jason Gallivan and Randy Flanagan showed that the human brain plans multiple actions simultaneously not just one (Queens Univ) Marcos Frank's team at Washington State University found that REM sleep converts waking experiences into lasting memories in the brains of infant animals ("Rapid eye movement sleep promotes cortical plasticity in the developing brain") (Neurosciencenews) Scientists at University College's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London found that the hippocampus binds together the diverse elements forming an event, allowing holistic recollection of past events (Nature Communications) The Vagus Nerve: A Back Door for Brain Hacking (IEEE Spectrum) June 2015 Researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Zurich claim that the chestnut-crowned babbler is capable of arranging meaningless sounds into meaningful "sentences" like humans do (Neurosciencenews) Research at University of Sydney's Brain and Mind Research Institute shows that the brains of people with recurrent depression have a significantly smaller hippocampus (Neurosciencenews) Scientists at Karolinska Institutet in collaboration with colleagues at Linkoeping University have created an organic bioelectronic device that is capable of receiving chemical signals just like an ordinary neuron (Neurosciencenews) May 2015 Chinese scientists genetically modify human embryos (Springer) The CRISP revolution in Biotech (Techcrunch) MIT's object recognition project (MIT) April 2015 JuanCarlos Belmonte at the Salk Institute has discovered a factor of aging (Genengnews) Quantum entanglement and spacetime (Quanta) Geoffrey Hinton, the man who changed the history of neural networks (The Star) The oldest tools made by human ancestors dated to 3.3 million years ago (Science) Modifying genomes (Science) The road to super-intelligence (Waitbutwhy) The Fermi Paradox (Waitbutwhy): if there are 100 billion billion Earth-like planets, of which one billion alone are in our galaxy, why haven't we heard from anybody out there? March 2015 Poverty may affect the growth of children's brain (Kimberly Noble of Columbia University and Elizabeth Sowell of Children's Hospital Los Angeles) Biologists call for halt to gene-editing technique in humans (MIT Technology Review) Heritable human genetic modifications pose serious risks, and the therapeutic benefits are tenuous (Nature) Editinh the DNA of children (Technology Review) Ido Bachelet of Israel's Bar-Ilan University is working on DNA nanobots designed to find and destroy cancer cells Eleanor Maguire's team found overlapping memory traces in of the CA3 region of the hippocampus The Umbral Moonshine Conjecture could revolutionize Physics Elena Cattaneo thinks that Huntington's disease may help explain the evolution of the human brain February 2015 Jose del Millan's team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne is experimenting with a system to remotely control a robot from home with one's thoughts January 2015 Ted Berger and Dong Song at the University of California in Los Angeles build a brain prosthesis to help people suffering from memory loss. (USC News) Click here for 2014 news

Back to Cognitive Science | My book on consciousness | My reviews of books
Apply for internships at www.scaruffi.com