It is, for many of us, the most wonderful time of the year. Christmas cheer is that thing which is often referred to by those who believe December really is the season to be jolly. Its that feeling of joy, warmth and nostalgia people feel when the jingle bells start jingling. But what is the science behind it?

Evidence of Christmas cheer inside the brain was found during a study run at the University of Denmark in 2015. Twenty people were shown images with either a Christmas or non-Christmas theme while having their brain monitored in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The fMRI machine highlights parts of the brain when there is an increase or decrease in activity in that region. And when there was an increase of activity for this study, that region lit up like well, a Christmas tree.

When the participants saw photographs of Christmas themed images, such as mince pies, a network of brain regions lit up, leading the researchers to conclude that they had found the hub of Christmas cheer inside the human brain. What the activation in brain regions actually meant, the researchers couldnt say. One theory was that that network in the brain could be related to memories or spirituality. The scientific understanding of our internal experiences is changing and it now seems likely that Christmas cheer may be an emotion in itself.

Many scientists used to think that emotions were pre-programmed reactions, hardwired into human brains. According to the traditional view, when you see Christmas TV adverts, some dedicated part of you (a kind of happiness circuit) leaps into action to bring you Christmas cheer.

The happiness circuit was thought to be a single part of the brain responsible for making you feel that warmth in your chest, making your heart beat quickly with joy and forming an expression of happiness on your face an expression thought to be universal across peoples and cultures.

According to the traditional view, humans have a small set of core emotions, like fear and happiness. Each of these emotions has its own dedicated brain region which creates changes in physiology and behaviour changes which are similar (if not the same) across different instances of the same emotion. For example, it was thought that the happiness you feel when you see a puppy would activate the same neural and physiological systems as the happiness you feel when you spend time with your friends. And so, when activated, the happiness circuit should light up in the fMRI machine. The traditional view feels intuitive. But, in the 100 years science has been studying emotion, scientists have never been able to find a specific happiness circuit or a circuit relating to any emotion.

When it comes to Christmas cheer, this is likely the reason why there was no specific neural path found in the fMRI data. Rather, the general network of neural activation associated with Christmas cheer points to a more nuanced understanding of emotions.

The contemporary view says that emotions are the brain summing up three sources of information to create an on-demand experience. The brain combines information about your physiological state, environment and personal experiences to form a subjective feeling inside you. According to the contemporary view, when you see Christmas TV adverts, you feel positive because you associate good things with Christmas, your heart beats quicker because some part of you recognises the excitement the advert evoked in you as a child and you express the feeling physically, usually through facial expressions.

Read more: You may not believe in Christmas but once a year, we all get a touch of its magic

All of these things culminate as a feeling. A feeling which we label and categorise as an emotion. Throughout our lives we learn to label categories of emotions. This labelling is why we use the same word to describe the terror felt heading on to a rollercoaster and the terror associated with being in a car accident, despite the fact that these experiences feel completely different.

But because the brain constructs an emotion on-demand using a wide range of brain regions, there is no neural signature or physiological blueprint with which to record or measure the experience. Many different parts of the brain work together to create an emotion depending on whats going on around and inside you. This is why every experience of an emotion even the same emotion will look different in an fMRI scanner. When it comes to emotions, brain activation isnt predictable because each emotion is formed from different, unpredictable information and contexts.

At Christmas time, each person has associations with songs, foods and activities that help them use the label Christmas cheer to categorise the experience. These associations are totally unique to each person. This is why your festive family traditions dont always seem to translate when you introduce them to your friends or your significant other.

But Christmas cheer can be shared with others through rituals (such as decorating the tree) and language (through things like carol singing) to cement those emotion categories. Every time we encounter items or ideas that we relate to over Christmas because of our past, our brains create the emotion of Christmas cheer.

But, of course, some people are like Ebeneezer Scrooge and just want to get through the holidays. A lack of Christmas cheer has anecdotally been called bah humbug syndrome. In the same way as Christmas cheer, bah humbug can be seen as an emotion. Perhaps its the dread of family politics or the tight, pounding chest people feel thinking about the cost of Christmas. But the brain combines these sources of information to create an emotion. So if youve had more negative experiences associated with Christmas, you are more likely to feel bah humbug than cheer.

Regardless of whether you tend to feel more of the Christmas cheer or the bah humbug emotion, there is a slither of magic in these festive emotions. In every waking moment, your brain is constructing your emotional reality. You have the power to increase your Christmas cheer or banish your feelings of bah humbug. This phenomenon is known as prediction, and its really just a numbers game. Rather than reacting to the world, your brain is running an internal model built around patterns of your previous experiences. The more instances your brain has of a positive experience relating to Christmas, the easier it is for your brain to construct Christmas cheer on-demand in the future.

So if you want to get into the Christmas spirit, spend time doing festive activities which you enjoy, share your experiences with the people you love, and do whatever rituals make sense to you. If science can give you anything this year, let it give you the gift of Christmas cheer.

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The neuroscience of the Christmas cheer 'emotion' - The Conversation UK

2019 was nuts for neuroscience. I said this last year too, but thats the nature of accelerating technologies: the advances just keep coming.

Therere the theoretical showdowns: a mano a mano battle of where consciousness arises in the brain, wildly creative theories of why our brains are so powerful, and the first complete brain wiring diagram of any species. This year also saw the the birth of hybrid brain atlases that seek to interrogate brain function from multiple levelsgenetic, molecular, and wiring, synthesizing individual maps into multiple comprehensive layers.

Brain organoids also had a wild year. These lab-grown nuggets of brain tissue, not much larger than a lentil, sparked with activity similar to preterm babies, made isolated muscles twitch, and can now be cloned into armies of near-identical siblings for experimentationprompting a new round of debate on whether theyll ever gain consciousness.

Then of course, theres the boom in neurotech. Fostered by insight into how neurons and circuits communicate with each other through a complex neural code, weve gotten ever closer to decoding the brain. Mind-controlled prosthetics are old news; the frontier now is engineering robotic limbs that can truly feel. Insight into our sensory cortices are inspiring light-based nervous systems that give robots multitudes of sensations. Elon Musks Neuralink finally came out after years of speculation, and a Wild West of brain-computer interfaces have sprung up, with the hope of one day restoring broken brain circuits without the need for surgery.

Thats already achievement-a-plenty. But as we wrap up the year, there are four mind-bending stories that still stick with meby asking about the nature of death, the promise of mind-reading, and new paths that may finally help us beat Alzheimers. These are the ones Ill leave you with.

The brain is a powerful but ultra-sensitive organ thats prone to injury. Once deprived of oxygen and nutrients, cells can begin to die within the hour. Thats why, zombie lore aside, scientists once thought its near impossible to resuscitate a brain to any sort of function hours after death.

Not true. In April, a team at Yale University reported that they successfully detected electrical activity in pig brains four hours after death. The results were a surprise: the team originally set out to develop a system that helps the brain maintain its integrity after removal for experimental purposes. How well it worked went beyond the teams expectations. Its impossible to say if the brains were conscious; that is, whether they were aware of being revived, though its highly (and I mean highly) unlikely. When the team saw signs of widespread, coordinated electrical activitywhich underlies consciousnessin their initial experiments, they anesthetized future experimental brains to block this sort of united firing, drastically reducing the chance consciousness could emerge in these brains.

Nevertheless, the study suggests that the brain is much more resilient to injuries such as stroke or trauma than previously thought. In the long term, it asks whether we might one day have a sort of CPR for the brain. And if so, how long can brains maintain their health after being separated from the body? We might have just taken the first step into the uncharted territories of death.

A few years ago, Dr. Miguel Nicolelis linked up animals brains into an internet that allowed each member to work collaboratively on a common problem. When connected to each other through implanted electrodes, the animals synced up their brains electrical activity in a way reminiscent of a single hive brain.

Nicolelis has now done the same experiment in humans, minus surgery. In a feat of neural engineering, the team used non-invasive electroencephalographs (EEGs) to read brain waves from two individuals and sent these signals to a third person by zapping their brain with magnetic pulsesa technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. Together, five triad groups solved a Tetris-like game using their brain waves alone, with an accuracy of over 80 percent, even when the researchers introduced noise.

One caveat: the system was rigged so that the neurotech wasnt detecting thought, for example, rotate the block or dont rotate. That decision was encoded as the presence or absence of light flashes, which are much easier for the EEG to read and for the TMS to deliver to the visual cortex. But its still a powerful proof-of-concept, in that even with our rudimentary brain reading and writing tech, its possible to link up human minds into a hive mind to solve problems. Nicolelis imagines a biological supercomputer made from networked human brains, which could conceivably cross language barriers and even enhance cognitive performance. The question is, if we open the sanctuary of our minds to others for gains in computing power, what do we stand to lose in privacy and autonomy?

Playing a collaborative game of Tetris isnt the only way scientists advanced mind reading technology. In January, one team combined deep learning with speech synthesis technology to translate what a person is hearing into reconstructed speech. The system captured electrical signals from the auditory cortex while a person listened to recordings of people speaking. These activity patterns were then decoded by an AI-based speech synthesizer and produced intelligible, if somewhat robotic, speech. Unfortunately, the system couldnt decode someones own internal thoughts.

But that changed three months later.

Another team engineered a neural decoder that decodes electrical signals measured from the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. Rather than containing information about semantics, these signals represent movement of the lips, tongue, larynx, and jaw. Different movement patterns are associated with different sounds, which the decoder can identify and synthesize into actual comprehensible sentences. For the first time, its possible to know what someone is trying to say by reading their brain activity alone, and the tech was further validated in a Q&A conversation. Earlier this month, yet another team found its possible to decode words and syllables based on recordings from the brains motor cortexthe part usually responsible for hand and arm movements. This opens another avenue of reading speech directly from the brain.

Not to be outdone, a team at Russian firm Neurobotics found they could use AI to decode what video clips people are watching based on their brainwaves alone. In contrast to the speech-decoding studies, which use implanted electrodes, here non-invasive EEG was sufficient to reconstruct nature scenes, sports, and human faces.

For now, our private thoughts are still private, and the tech mainly helps those who cant speak reconnect with the world. But think about this: if someday a tech giant offers you the ability to text or post using your mind only, would (and should) you go for it?

Dementia is one of the most frustrating neurological disorders of our time. Despite decades of research, nearly every single Alzheimers drug that targets toxic protein clumpscalled beta-amyloidthought responsible for the disease has failed. Generally, these drugs are proteins that break up clumps or neutralize their toxic effects.

This year saw an explosion in alternative potential treatments and theories.

One that especially gained steam suggests flashing lights and clicking sound could potentially break up toxic protein clumps and improve brain function, at least in mice. The treatment, cheap, non-invasive, and dramatically effective, offers new hope to the long-struggling field. Others suggest that mutations to DNA in brain cells scrambles certain genes and could be a root cause. Yet others are taking a gene therapy approach to the Alzheimers dilemma, adding in a dose of a protective gene variant in high-risk individuals.

Although its impossible to say if any of these new routes will lead anywhere, one thing is clear: the more scientific treatment ideas we have, the higher the chance well finally tame Alzheimers in the near future.

Image Credit: Gerd Altman / Pixabay

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This Year's 4 Most Mind-Boggling Stories About the Brain - Singularity Hub

Beyond the bright colors and hallucinogenic imagery of psychedelic artthe visuals of Ram Dass's 1971 book Be Here Now has never left public consciousness there has long been a crusade to clinically research substances such as LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, DMT, and ibogaine. We've been informed, again and again and again, about the various ways that current pharmaceutical treatments in our for-profit mental health system is not only not working, but doing more damage than healing. Discussion over health care inevitably defaults to mechanisms for paying for a broken model, rarely touching upon the root causes of why so many people are depressed, sick, anxious, and suicidal in the first place.

We. Need. Better. Solutions.

In regard to psychedelics, an entire herd of elephants remain locked in a room. Thanks to the questionable (and admittedly racist) wars launched by the Nixon and Reagan administrations (first dreamed up during the Anslinger crusades), we've been denied access to these potentially therapeutic substances. Fortunately, a renaissance is occurring in psychedelics research, with ketamine being the first to be legally prescribed psychedelic for treatment-resistant depression and both psilocybin and MDMA being fast-tracked by the FDA after being labelled breakthrough therapies.

One challenge psychedelics advocates will have to face is how these drugs are treated moving through the current medical model. Regardless of personal feelings on the subject, these substances have to contend with a system that requires expensive clinical trials and will be sold in a capitalist marketplace. There will inevitably be patent issues and territorial fights. Unlike cannabis, which is a relatively mild substance with few documented consequences, psychedelics need to be rigorously evaluated and tested. While some label everyone working in medicine as minions of Big Pharma, we need to separate researchers and scientists from the shady dealings of shareholders and profiteers.

Michael Ehlers is an industry figure that has long taken an interest in psychedelics, predominantly from an outsider perspective. Now the former executive vice president for research and development at Biogen is accepting an advisory role with Field Trip Health, the psychedelics-focused organization that recently opened the world's first psilocybin research center. (You can listen to my talk with Field Trip co-founder, Ronan Levy, here.)

I chatted with Ehlers, he is also the former chief scientific officer for neuroscience at Pfizer, about his interest in psychedelics, their potential efficacy, their historical usage in ritual, and how the current model will deal with their vetting and potential applications. With every question, he was informed and honest, offering what he knows and being truthful about what he does not. There is a lot of work ahead in pharmaceuticals, yet it is undeniable the mental health industry needs a reboot, in the same way psychedelics are said to reboot the neural circuitry of the brain, making this class of substances an ideal medicine for study.

Part of my conversation with Ehlers is below; you can read the full transcript here.

Photo courtesy of Michael Ehlers

Derek: You have an accomplished career in the pharmaceutical industry. Now you've taken on an advisory role with a company specializing in psychedelics. I would love to know when you first became interested in psychedelics as a potential therapeutic tool.

Michael: I've followed this area for quite some time. I've been intensely involved in different aspects of drug discovery and development, particularly, although not exclusively, within CNS or neuroscience drug discovery, including neuropsychiatric disease. I've followed more peripherally some of the efforts both in standard pharmacology and then some of the emerging work, whether it was more acute, high-dose psychedelics or microdosing psychedelics in neuropsychiatric disease.

At the same time, I was following a lot of the work on some of the core receptor biology and neurobiology, which was really advancing in systems neuroscience. Following this field and some of the early indications of potential clinical efficacy were some of the things that really got me quite excited. I was particularly close with aspects of what's been done over the past 10 years with ketamine, which is a very different agent but also in the class, initially leading from small trials on ketamine for acute, anti-depressive actions, now to Janssen and J&J using a variation of this, esketamine, to get full-on FDA approval for the first new mechanism in depression in 20 years. The combination of these things indicated to me that there could be a new paradigm change or highly-active psychopharmacology to potentially treat some of these otherwise fairly intractable types of neuropsychiatric disorders.

There are some other things that were also on the horizon. The history of CNS drug development, particularly in neuropsychiatric disease, has been one where the empirical observations in human patients have really guided efficacious therapeutics by and large. Even though I know we like to talk a lot about rational drug discovery and development, at least in the field of neuropsychiatry, because there's still so much that is not known that we've had to rely a lot more on empirical observations in humans.

There's probably no more profound CNS pharmacology out there than that with psychedelics like psilocybin or LSD or ketamine. I've actually long thought it was just a matter of figuring out what a treatment paradigm could look likehow maybe when you dose it could you alter aspects of its dose exposure and distribution and then in what exact disease or syndrome.

Derek: You have a history of working with rare diseases. Field Trip is going to tackle a wide range of studies, but the ones that are really on everyone's mind (in terms of what psychedelics could potentially help) ranges from PTSD to treatment-resistant depression and anxiety. These are much more common diseases. Do you have any background in those diseases and, in the advisory role, what will you be doing for them?

Michael: I've got a lot of background in that. I worked for nine years in large biopharma, six years at Pfizer. I started in neuroscience and pain, but ultimately ran several divisions of Pfizer R & D, that did include rare disease, but included a bunch of other things. Then I ran R & D advising for three-and-a-half years. I've done clinical trials in depression, schizophrenia, PTSD, generalized anxiety disorder, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease. I've done both rare diseases and a lot of common disorders: hemophilia, genetic disease, and some of the rare diseases as well. I've done stroke trials. I've had experience across a range.

One thing I like is about what Field Trip is doing and the prospect of these diseases is that they're incredibly common. Roughly 25 percent of people will have some experience with major depression in their lives. One percent of the world has schizophrenia. These are serious and significant disorders. I really love the fact that this fieldand Field Trip is really part of that in a leadership roleis looking to take some of these on.

Although the lore has been that there hasn't been that much innovation, I actually think that's not true. I think we're just at the beginning of a whole new era of advances in neuropsychiatric disease. I can point to several things that indicate that. I have a feeling that if we really understand that the best way to dose and conduct trials with psychedelics like psilocybin and be able to segment patients who are the most likely to benefit, this can become quite important.

Derek: You mentioned that pharma companies stepping away from neuropsychiatric disease. There is obviously a problem with SSRIs over the long-term. Efficacy rates tend to be high in the short-term, but over the long-term prove problematic. When you're stepping into substances that potentially could help treatment-resistant mental health diseases in one dose (or just a couple of doses), how do you think that companies are going to be able to monetize this, especially given the incredible amounts of money that have to go into R & D and clinical trials?

Michael: It's a very good question. I think we haven't solved that problem yet. There are a lot of open questions. Will some of these therapies really be single dose or short regiments and you're done? Will it have to be that there's some degree of maintenance where there's some regularity in the need for therapy? Will it really be like antibiotics or gene therapy? We don't know.

A lot of these neuropsychiatric diseases, although they're complex, have genetic features that are polygenetic but they're related. Whether you're talking about, schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, ADHD, there's a complex genetic architecture that has shared features across all of those. The risk of relapse and occurrences will be there in a given population. I tend to think the likelihood of things like ketamine or psychedelic treatments for depression will be one of periodic needs.

The question you raised is an excellent one, which is what ultimately is the commercial model for that? Certainly, the hope is that it doesn't go down the road of antibiotics for which the commercial incentivization for real R & D and drug development has been catastrophic. I don't see that in this space. I just don't think it's going to be quite as simple as "one and done." The prevalence alone will be a strong incentive for investment when there's real efficacy potential.

Derek: Please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm fascinated by neuroscience, but not having an academic background my knowledge is limited. That's why I love talking to people about this. From my understanding, SSRIs work in a much different manner in terms of the serotonin release then psychedelics. Do you see any potential benefits or dangers in the ways that psychedelics deal with the serotonergic system?

Michael: It is quite different. From a simple pharmacology point of view, SSRIs are, as their name indicates, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors: they block serotonin transporters that would normally release serotonin back up into nerve cells so that it increases serotonergic tone. Once released, it stays released in the extracellular space for longer, acting on all the different receptors in the places that it does.

The psychedelics typically act directly on serotonin receptors within serotonin transporters, but their action at different receptors has different potency. It's not a clean pharmacology. People will talk about 5-HT-2A receptors and they're clearly important, and there's been a lot of study on that, but we also know that if you just give a pure 5-HT-2A receptor an agonist you do not reproduce the effects of psilocybin or LSD.

The pharmacology is complex; it's clearly different than SSRIs. Obviously, the behavioral and therapeutic groups are very different. It just highlights that we really need to understand it better. It's going to reveal I think very important things about psychiatric disease and fundamental neuroscience.

A shaman gathers the raw materials to make ayahuasca in the jungle outside of Iquitos.

Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Derek: One of the criticisms of the way that the industry is right now is that, why would a doctor spend an hour talking to a patient when you can see six patients in an hour and write a script? Efficacy rates are different for different people, dealing with the microbiome, for example, and the way that their gut processes drugs. It's a very complex issue. One thing I believe is going to be important is that psychotherapy is going to be tethered with psychedelics, especially if people have never done them before. Will that coupling provide a sustainable model?

Michael: Here's an aspect of what's important to understand: the field has understandably taken a cautious approach, which I think is warranted in this whole guided therapy concept and that will probably be required for certain dosing regimens. I would personally like to see this converted into what is a very standard thing in a lot of drug administration in practice or trials, which is more about medical monitoring. Change it from the notion of it's guided therapy to monitoring like you would for a lot of things. People go to IV infusion centers to get their IV drug. It's different, but there's nothing that unusual about the notion of having a monitored pharmaceutical or pharmacological drug intervention even in standard practice. This will likely be part of that.

If you're a neurologist treating MS and you've got MS patients on Alemtuzumab or Natalizumab as your IV drugs. They come in, you've got your IV clinic. They come in regularly, every month or every quarter depending on the drug, and they get their IV infusion. They get monitored while it happens because they can have an immune response. I see a future for some of these psychoactive therapeutics where you have something similar.

Now the question will be to what extent does the guided as opposed to monitoring aspect of that influence the degree of efficacy? That's something which really would need to be studied. To the extent it really requires some special type of guided activity that will be a little bit more of a limitation. To the extent that it can be ultimately the design in a more monitoring approach with education, the more widespread this can become.

Does that analogy make sense to you? There's a lot of precedence for this in other areas. The way this has gotten utilized now is still a remnant of causing people to have profound hallucinations and behavioral stuff and paranoia. Some people get afraid of that, so we need to have some monitoring.

We need to understand doses. We need to know the extent to which those experiences are part and parcel to a therapeutic response or not associated with a therapeutic response.

Derek: How much do you think anecdote is going to matter? One main issue I have with the whole cannabis legalization process is the extraction of CBD being sold for every possible ailment out there when the actual evidence is almost nothing at this point, besides epilepsy. At the same time, dealing with mental health disorders, how much are we going to rely on anecdote? If people think they're getting better, there's placebo, and it actually helps them get better.

Michael: I hope we moved beyond anecdotes, and I think that you're right about CBD, but it's interesting the way you put that because of the fact that rigorous trials have been done in rare epilepsies, like Dravet and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, nobody disputes that. Patients in need can get insurance companies or health systems in other countries to reimburse for that. That's what I mean by saying real location impact is going to require that component of it too. You'd like to be able to generate the evidence because nothing comes without safety concerns. The nice thing about putting this all through the lens of drug discovery and development is that it allows the communityand here I mean the medical community, policymakers, others to have a much clearer view of the benefit-risk, and where the benefit-risk is positive, in which case that's usually a required element for real access for patients.

Of course, you could argue and say, "well, if it's just out there, people can try it, we'll see and that's fine," but this doesn't allow us from a clinical scientific vantage point to really know when and where we are going to provide benefits. That's what we really need to work toward. There's enough anecdotal evidence out there to justify rigorous evaluation.

--

Stay in touch with Derek on Twitter and Facebook. His next book is Hero's Dose: The Case For Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy.

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This year on Untangle we covered everything from happiness to biohacking to the neuroscience of love with experts on mindfulness, brain health, relationships, performance, and so much more. We culled some of our favorite books from those interviews to help you kickstart your 2020 mindfulness practice and have the best year yet. Here they are:

Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence by Dr. Rick Hanson Rick shares how we can hardwire our brains for happiness using practices that help us cultivate and experience the good in our lives while reducing our natural negativity bias.

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From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness by Mark Coleman Mark gets to the heart of what mindfulness really is and introduces practices that you can use in your everyday life to bring you more peace.

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Undo It:How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases by Dr. Dean Ornish Lifestyle medicine pioneer Dr. Dean Ornish shares what it takes to be the best version of yourself, including how you can reverse heart disease by optimizing fourimportant areas of your life: stress less, love more, eat well, and exercise.

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Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression by Dr. Alex Korb Alex explains how to take control of your wellbeing with the power of neuroscience. He discusses the neural nature of happiness and provides practical tips to increase your happiness levels.

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The Five Invitations: Discovering What Death Can Teach Us About Living Fully by Frank Ostaseski A leading voice in the end-of-life care movement, Frank shares comforting and inspiring truths on how we live and die, and on what matters most. When we get to the end of our lives, the two questions most often asked are: Did I love well? and Am I loved? His teachings show us that we can live with joy and sorrow, and live a rich life filled with love.

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The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life by Todd Herman This elite performance coach discusses how top performers create alter egos that allow them to unlock characteristics of success that they otherwise might not be able to access. He shows us how we can use these techniques to increase our own productivity and success.

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Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeons Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart by James Doty An accomplished neurosurgeon and entrepreneur tells the story of how a magic shopkeeper transformed his life by teaching him the magic of meditation! He attributes much of his success to this early event in his life.

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Unstoppable: A 90-Day Plan to Biohack Your Mind and Body for Success by Ben Angel Ben shares how his early depression and lack of energy led him to find solutions he never imagined would make him feel better, making it his mission to explore alternatives beyond medicine and self-help. The book shows us how to get fired up and focused with tools that may have the power to change our lives forever.

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Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love by Dr. Helen Fisher Anthropologist Helen Fisher shares whats actually happening in our brains when we fall in love. She and a team of scientists scan the brains of people in love to see where different areas of the brain get a boost of blood flow, building the case that romantic passion is hardwired into our brains.

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About Untangle

Untangle is the podcast from 5-star app Meditation Studio and Muse, the brain sensing headband that gives you biofeedback on your meditation practice. Hosts Patricia Karpas and Ariel Garten interview thought leaders, authors and experts in areas related to mindfulness, neuroscience, brain practices, happiness, relationships, resilience and much more. https://meditationstudioapp.com/podcasts

About Patricia Karpas

Patricia Karpas is the co-founder of Meditation Studio, head of content for Muse, the brain sensing headband and co-host of the Untangle Podcast, where she has interviewed over 200 experts, thought leaders and authors on how mindfulness, contemplative and brain-focused practices change us.

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Before she became a sous-chef at McMurdo research station in Antarctica, Rose McAdoo was a pastry chef in New York City. But even on the other side of the world, surrounded by polar research staff, she couldnt stop thinking about cake.

During the summer season, more than a thousand people work at McMurdo. Theyre not all scientists. The majority of residents at the station are there in support roles, to keep the place running like a little village. But the research is never far away, and while working in the 24-hour kitchen, McAdoo learned about the scientific studies happening around her.

Everything I learned, my brain instantly processes into cake format, says McAdoo. Ascending and descending data sets or systems become different sized stacked tiers. The ever-changing ice break patterns that I watched morph every day looked like massive sheets of fondant. I saw NASA Operation IceBridge data as future time-lapsed cake decor videos.

Four of the science-themed cakes that pastry chef Rose McAdoo created after spending several months ... [+] working at McMurdo research station in Antarctica. From left to right, the cakes represent a paleontological dig in Antarcticas Dry Valleys, a polar icebreaker clearing the way for a resupply ship to reach the research station, LIDAR laser research studying the Earth's atmosphere from the 24-hour darkness of Antarctic winters, and Dr. Shawn Devlin collecting sediment samples under the ice of Lake Fryxell.

There was no opportunity to put these elaborate cake ideas into practice right away, but as soon as she left Antarctica during the off-season, McAdoo started work on the cakes. She stayed in touch with some of the researchers she met, who provided feedback and resources to help her get the science just right.

McAdoos creations demonstrate the wide variety of research that takes place at McMurdo: Ice core samples that hold the key to historic environmental conditions, sea spiders living in freezing cold water, astronomical observations, paleontological digs. One glimpse at the cakes immediately tells you that Antarctic research is about much more than penguins.

Unmolding of an ice core sample created out of isomalt. This project was a collaboration between ... [+] Rose McAdoo and Chelsea Burgess.

But you dont have to be an experienced pastry chef to make a science cake. Several scientists are making their own research or that of their colleagues deliciously edible.

Last year, physicist Katharine Leney made a cake to celebrate a successful year for the ATLAS experiment she was involved with at CERN. ATLAS is a detector at the Large Hadron Collider that measures a range of different signals. It was one of the detectors that spotted the Higgs Boson a few years ago, for example. Leneys cake features edible replicas of some of the graphs describing the results of ATLASs work throughout 2018. This year, a similar cake even included a replica muon detector.

Katharine Leney created this cake to mark the end of run 2 of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, in late ... [+] 2018.

These are not the only cakes Leney has made at CERN. Together with colleague Katy Grimm she has turned cake making into a way to introduce people to new scientific concepts. Their outreach project Physics Cakes shares many of the cakes on Twitter.

Biologist Lusa Jabbur makes science cakes for the birthdays of her coworkers. This summer, she created this tiered cake with a phylogenetic tree a diagram that shows how closely related different species are to each other. On Jabburs cake, the tree almost resembles a real tree, with the birds sitting on the branches.

Lusa Jabbur's bird phylogeny cake shows how different bird species are related to each other.

Five years ago, ecologists Carly Ziter and Rose Graves baked a forest fire cake to celebrate the successful PhD defence of forest ecologist Brian J Harvey at the University of Wisconsin Madison. The most striking feature of the cake are the large flames made of melted hard candies, which engulf a wafer roll forest.

Carly Ziter and Rose graves baked this forest fire cake several years ago, to mark the PhD defence ... [+] of forest ecologist Brian Harvey.

Cookies are another popular medium for science bakers. Crystal Lantz (@BoozyBrain on Twitter) even designed and 3D-printed her own neuroscience-themed cookie cutters to make it easier to create cookies in the shape of neurons, mouse brains or fruit flies (which are often studied in neuroscience labs).

Crystal Lantz created these neuroscience-themed cookies with custom cookie cutters she designed and ... [+] 3D-printed.

And what about a gingerbread lab bench? A few years ago, microbiologist and science communicator Anne A. Madden (@AnneAMadden) deviated from the traditional gingerbread house blueprint and created a lab bench with edible lab equipment. This year, she built a new bench to help lab supply company Thermo Fisher run a gingerbread lab bench competition, in which even more scientists were encouraged to get creative and scientific in their kitchen.

Anne A. Madden created this lab bench out of gingerbread, complete with confectionary lab equipment.

The challenge of making science cake or cookies is to get the core concept of the research across in a medium that doesnt lend itself to a lot of details. Usually, scientific information comes with a lot of caveats and footnotes, graphs, figures, and subtle explanations. On a cake or cookie, youre limited by what fits on a cake, and by what you can express in icing and decorations.

At the moment, Rose McAdoo is back in Antarctica. Shes working as sous-chef for NASA's long-duration balloon atmospheric research camp, but she has also found some time for her next science baking project.

I'm currently building a large sugar art piece for the McMurdo Alternative Arts Gallery (taking place in our fuels barn on December 30), which will be a 3D replica of a galaxy star-origin thermal map from a NASA-funded research team here.

McAdoos shares her scientific and tasty creations on her Instagram account @WhiskMeAwayCakes

View original post here:
Have Your Science And Eat It: Scientific Research As Cakes - Forbes

(PEDRO ARMESTRE/AFP/GettyImages)

The concept is called reverse inference. Its both neurosciences greatest ambition, and the origin of its most frustratingly breathless overstatements.

Every so often, a person is unexpectedly thrust into a defining wedge-issue of an era. This time, I was asked rhetorically, Is being gay a choice? Well, my friend answered their own question; according to a series of studies, including one published inScientific Reportsin 2018, scientists have discovered neurological differences between gay and straight people. When subjects were shown a series of pornographic pictures, depending on the content of the images, people with different sexual orientations had different brain activity. In other words, there is a concrete biological origin of sexuality; there is such a thing as a gay or straight brainrather, a biologically-inevitably gay or straight brain.

As my friend concluded from this development, this proves that being gay is not simply psychological; theres an actual biology to it. Those in right-wing chatrooms trying to mock gay people by saying things to the effect of, I want to be a frog, therefore, Im a frog are now, scientifically verifiably, jerks. Just as one cant just decide to be a frog, one cannot simply claim to be gay and then, poof, become gay.

Without science, if someone states his or her sexual preference, either he or she is telling the truth or making it up. Either a person is gay or theyre pretending to be. With science, however, maybe this debate can be resolved for good.

Personally, I do not have a strong position on whenin the course of ones developmenta person starts being gay. Ive seen scientific arguments for genetic destiny, but Im also drawn to the idea that sexual preference is slowly shaped by an interplay of genetic and social factors throughout adolescence and even into adulthood.

I do, however, have a position on whether brain-imaging research supports the conclusion that being gay is a biological-inevitability. More importantly, I have a position on whether scientific research can inform our moral obligations towards supporting gay rights. In this essay, I hope to show that in specific, neuroscientific terms, we do not know with much confidence what being gay really is. Furthermore, even if we did, science cannot resolve the LGBTQ-rights aspect of the culture wars.

Brain Imaging Does Not Prove Biological Causation, and, Being LGBT is, in General, More than Sexual Orientation

Despite the involvement of extremely complex brain-recording technology, the design of the 2018 experiment was very simple. Scientists collected a group of people who were gay and another group of people who were straight, positioned them in a brain scanner, and showed them pornography. While the subjects awkwardly looked at naked bodies, researchers collected images of their brain activity, and, lo and behold, discovered that some areas of the brain showed differences.

However, one big issue is that straight people and gay people do not differ just in sexuality. There are also (in general) differences in personalities and lifestyles. What if the brain differences seen in this study are really just differences in social presentation? If being gay is (often) more than sexual preference, we cant be confident that the neurological differences are strictly about sexuality.

This confound is not unique just to studies dealing with sexuality. The way we conduct brain-imaging today struggles to prove causation in a traditional scientific sense. Before scientists are willing to adopt the term causation, they want to see that the manipulation of some variable has an impact on another. In other words, changing X reliably changes Y. Sure, we can compare brain activity between groups; however, we cannot intervene in a way that truly mimics what were recording.

The problem is two-fold. Commonly-used brain-recording technologies like EEG and fMRI do not offer very precise resolution. Instead, they record from large swaths of brain tissue. With these technologies, we can evaluate whether a large population of cells are more of less activebut not what any individual cell is doing. Its not clear whether neuroscience actually needs to know the functionality of each cell, but its clear that our recording technology provides highly ambiguous information.

The second half of the problem lies with the difficulty with brain stimulation. Non-invasive stimulation technologies (like transcranial magnetic stimulation) can be done pretty easily, but these technologies also lack precise resolution. In this case, even if our recording technologies provide un-ambiguous data, we could not intentionally produce that same activity pattern.

If we could reproducibly induce gay or straight preferences, we would know with real confidence that we had discovered the biological basis of homosexuality. Tangentially, if we had the technical capacity to change a persons sexual orientation, it would open up a pandoras box of ethical dilemmas (should a parent have the right to convert their child?). Fortunately, this horror scenariolike Mike Pences conversion-camp fantasyis well beyond our technical capabilities.

A Bigger Problem; Neurosciences Persistent Fallacy

Perhaps, though, we ought to try a thought experiment. Lets say its a little bit in the future, and a son just announced to his father that he is, in fact, gay. The father decides that he needs some verification, and, as such, the father takes his son to see the local scientist. The scientist explains that long ago, researchers identified the neural correlates to being gay, as described above, using the round-up and scan method. The scientist then tells the father that he can place the son in the scanner, and, after a short while, determine whether his brain has the characteristics that make his brain gay.

Neuroscientists have long hoped that a persons mental state could be inferred based on the findings of a brain scan. What Russell Poldrack and many other neuroscientists have argued, however, is that this approach relies on questionable reasoning. If we understand a persons psychology, the argument goes, we can also identify the underlying neurology. Just throw the person in a brain-scanner, and theres your answer. However, going one step furthertaking that newly discovered neurologyand inferring that same psychology in a different person is something of a logical leap.

X Y does not imply Y X, because sometimes, maybe, Z Y. Also, some Xs are Ys does not imply that all Xs are Ys.

Its pretty simple. Scientists might be able to observe that gay people, on average, have one sort of brain. But not every gay persons brain is going to appear gay. Furthermore, some non-gay people may have brains that appear gay, even if they are not gay. The differences that scientists observe in the brain are based on group averages; they almost never perfectly distinguish between two groups of people, and, in the case of the study linked here, they did not appear to. The concept is called reverse inference. Its both neurosciences greatest ambition, and the origin of its most frustratingly breathless overstatements.

However, enlightened neuroscientists do note that reverse inference is not necessarily wrong, and, at times, it may be useful. Even if we cannot be 100% sure that a particular brain region underlies a particular trait, maybe we can be 95% sure. Oftentimes, the correlations we find with brain imaging research are suggestive. Nevertheless, especially in situations where there is some variability in the neurobiology (which, is basically, every brain scan study), people need to be very cautious in making that final reverse inference.

Conclusion

Neuroscience cannot tell us much about psychology without relying on current psychological measures. In order to conduct research, we have to have some operational definitions. In this caseif we want to identify the neural correlates of being gaywe have to rely on whether people say theyre gay. Self-report is a premise of the argument, which means that science is not well-prepared to transcend self-report. If a person states that he or she is gay, neuroscience is generally not in a position to elaborate.

As a scientist, I believe in the importance of science-advocacy, and I agree with the sentiment that much evil originates from humankinds attempts to define and divide our species into various categories. I also believe that sexuality does not have to be a rigid unchanging quality defined at birth.

However, in this case, we are likely placing solidarity-signaling over neutral scientific reasoning. Confidently asserting the existence of inevitably-gay-brains might make for the ultimate alliance with the LGBTQ community, but it may overstate the confidence of our science. Scientists are allying with the LGBTQ community certainly not because of political identity, no, but because its rational to do, in their viewbecause its scientific to do so.

But some political questions transcend objective reality. Whether climate change is happening is science, whether we should do something about it isnt. Whether or not we believe that a society ought to embrace homosexuality, or a government ought to protect LGBTQ rights, is a moral question, not a scientific one.The underlying scientific reality can inform our position on whether we support gay rights, but its only part of the equation.

Andrew Neff lectures in psychology at Rochester University and runs the blog Neuroscience From Underground.

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When Neuroscience Interjects Itself into Debates on Sexuality - Merion West

A new study by psychologist Shantanu Jadhav and his lab shines new light on how rats make decisions based on recent memories.

During sleep, the brain replays each memory from the day in a unique pattern of brain cell firings. The activation of a pattern essentially creates a recording of the memory so it can be stored for the long term.

This process, called memory consolidation, occurs while were awake, too. In a recent paper in Neuron, assistant professor of psychology Shantanu Jadhav and his lab demonstrate how memory consolidation works in rats brains when they make a decision.

With remarkable precision, Jadhav and his team identified and isolated specific patterns of brain cell firings in the animals that corresponded to individual memories. As a result, they could tell what the rodents were remembering. They also found a way to predict what the animals would do next.

In the long term, researchers hope that a greater understanding of how the brain processes memories will lead to treatments for diseases where memory is impaired, such as Alzheimers or other kinds of dementia.

The experiment

Jadhav and his collaborators designed a W-shaped maze. Each prong of the W held small wells with a tasty rat treat. A rat entering the maze on the right would find the nearest treat in the center. After that, the nearest treat would be on the left.

It worked in the opposite direction as well; after noshing on the left, the rodent went to the center and then back to the right. Over the course of 6 to 8 hours, the rats formed separate memories of each of the four parts of a roundtrip journey right to center, center to left, left to center and center to right. Each part corresponded to a unique and identifiable pattern of brain cell firings.

Decision time for the rats

When the rats arrived in the center of the maze, they paused for several seconds. During this time, they pondered their next move. They could go back to where they came from (no treat) or they could continue to the opposite side of the W (treat!).

The scientists monitored the rats decision-making process in real-time. First, the rats replayed the sequence of brain cell firings from a memory of one of the four legs of their journey.

But what surprised the scientists was that the rats' brains played the sequence in reverse order, rewinding the recording of the memory. This process is called reverse replay and enables the rats to recall the past in order to decide what to do next.

The rats also pondered their future. Here, the rats played their memories brain cell firings in the original order in which they occurred in a process called forward replay.

Reverse and forward replay occur in the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure located close to the brain's center. (It actually means seahorse in Greek.) The hippocampus handles spatial memory, which in both rats and humans makes it possible to determine location and navigation from place to place. "It's the internal GPS system for navigation in the mammalian brain," Jadhav said.

The brain firings involved in reverse and forward replay are called sharp-wave ripples. In both rats and humans, they happen in bursts that last a few hundred milliseconds a good thing. It may take an hour to go to work, but if recalling the memory of your route took that long youd never return home.

What will the rat do next?

Jadhav and his fellow researchers wanted to see if they could predict the rats route by analyzing their brain cell firings. They observed that the rats final decision on what route to take next didn't happen in the hippocampus, which only sifted through the options. It was in the prefrontal cortex, located behind the forehead, where the animals future path was determined.

The researchers matched activity in the prefrontal cortex to the four brain firing patterns that occurred during the rats journey. Whichever patterns wound up being activated by the prefrontal cortex indicated the route the animal would travel.

Just before the animals moved on from the center, Jadhav and his team observed the pattern fire, enabling them to foresee the rats' next move. "We could actually predict the rats' future," Jadhav said.

Brandeis graduate students Justin D. Shin and Wenbo Tang co-authored the Neuron paper.This research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Whitehall Foundation.

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The neuroscience behind remembering the past and plotting the future - Brandeis University

The filmgoers didnt flinch at the scene of the dapper man planting a time bomb in the trunk of the convertible, or tense up as the unsuspecting driver and his beautiful blonde companion drove slowly through the town teeming with pedestrians, or jump out of their seats when the bomb exploded in fiery carnage. And they sure as heck werent wowed by the technical artistry of this famous opening shot of Orson Welles 1958 noir masterpiece, Touch of Evil, a single three-minute take that ratchets up the suspense to 11 on a scale of 1 to 10.

In fairness, lab mice arent cineastes. But where the rodents fell short as film critics they more than delivered as portals into the brain. As the mice watched the film clip, scientists eavesdropped on each ones visual cortex. By the end of the study, the textbook understanding of how the brain sees had been as badly damaged as the Touch of Evil convertible, scientistsreportedon Monday.

The new insights into the workings of the visual cortex, they said, could improve technologies as diverse as self-driving cars and brain prostheses to let the blind see.

Neuroscience lets us make better object recognition systems for, say, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence-based diagnostics, said Joel Zylberberg of York University, an expert on machine learning and neuroscience who was not involved in the new research. But computer vision has been hampered by an insufficient understanding of visual processing in the brain. The unprecedented findings in the new study, he said, promise to change that.

The textbook understanding of how the brain sees, starting with streams of photons landing on the retina, reflects research from the 1960s that won two of its pioneers aNobel prizein medicine in 1981. It basically holds that neurons in the primary visual cortex, where the signals go first, respond to edges: vertical edges, horizontal edges, and every edge orientation in between, moving and static. We see a laptop screen because of how its edges abut whats behind it, sidewalks because of where their edges touch the curbs. Higher-order brain systems take these rudimentary perceptions and process them into the perception of a scene or object.

Its been known for more than a decade that this textbook model is partly wrong and largely incomplete, said neurobiologist Saskia de Vries of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, who led the mouse-vision study. To see if she could do better, she and her colleagues showed mice simple gratings (lots of edges), moving gratings,118 photos, and the Touch of Evil opening, recording the resulting electrical activity from hundreds of neurons in six regions of each mouses visual cortex.

Which visual features neurons responded to showed that the textbook model doesnt hold up very well, de Vries said. Only about 10% of the mices visual neurons responded to specific kinds of edges (straight or tilted, horizontal or vertical, sharp or blurry, fat or slender) as per the textbook version of the visual cortex, she and her colleagues reported in Nature Neuroscience. Instead, some responded only to movements of facial muscles, others to several features rather than to a single kind of edge. Yet others, they speculate, might even respond to sounds.

Touch of Evil elicited responses from the greatest number of neurons. That makes sense. In Welles opening scene, the camera zooms in and pans out, it sweeps across the scene, and different people and objects move into and out of the frame, a smorgasbord of imagery that should cover just about everything a visual cortex might need to process. But textbooks say that fewer neurons respond to complex visual scenes than to the simpler, edge-based elements the scenes are made of. The Allen Institute team found the opposite: Static gratings interested the fewest neurons; Welles had a much bigger fan base.

All told, 77% of neurons throughout the mices visual cortex responded to at least one thing the scientists showed them. But in some neighborhoods, only 33% did. The rest seemed to be on strike.

Thats not supposed to happen either. Thats a huge finding, said neuroscientist Bruno Olshausen of the University of California, Berkeley, who hasarguedthat neuroscience understands no more than 20% of how the visual cortex actually operates. Every visual neuron supposedly responds tosomekind of edge, so what are these silent neurons doing? Olshausen asked. Assuming the finding isnt an artifact, thats a huge population of [visual] neurons that arent doing vision. This should be a wake up call to everyone in the field. Something is dramatically wrong with the standard model.

The surprise finding, he added, makes this a tour de force and a first in neuroscience, to systematically characterize such a large population of neurons across different layers, areas and using different stimuli. The data will be invaluable to theorists and modelers for years to come.

It could be that the scientists didnt show the mice images with the particular feature that these unresponsive visual neurons notice. But that seems unlikely, given the diversity of images: butterflies, leopards, fences, mountains, trees, leaves, rocks, sidewalks, windows, staircases, pencils, and more. Instead, de Vries said, I think its a reflection that other things are going on in the visual cortex, like visual neurons processing sound or something else non-visual.

Since machine-vision developers take their cues from how brains see, the Allen Institute results, if confirmed, carry an important message, Yorks Zylberberg said. It shows that there isnt a mess of [undifferentiated neurons] doing all the same thing, which is what we put into our systems now. Instead, theres at least 10 different types of visual neurons that respond to specific aspects of the visual worlda complexity that computerized object-recognition systems might profitably emulate.

As for the scientists choice of flicks, we picked Touch of Evil because we were looking for a movie clip that had a lot of diverse motion without camera cuts, de Vries said.

Republished with permission from STAT. This article originally appeared on December 16 2019

Original post:
What Mice Watching Orson Welles's Touch of Evil Can Teach Scientists about Vision - Scientific American

A look at the day's major movers, including Carclo, IXICO, Powerhouse Energy, OnTheMarket and Nichols

() saw its shares top the market gainers on Monday, leaping nearly 77% higher to 1.15p after the global learning and skills development partner, announced the sale of its Malaysian business, to AAA Management Science Academy PLT for a total cash consideration of MYR 400,000 (about75,000).

The group said the cash consideration will be payable over a 13 month period and will be used towards the repayment of an existing bank loan in Malaysia, with the proposed transaction expected to complete on 31 December 2019.

Sam Malafeh, the chief executive officer of Malvern, said: "We are pleased to have agreed the sale of the Malaysian business, which will now allow us to focus on growing our core operations in the UK and Singapore."

PLC (), the manufacturer of injection moulded plastic parts, hardened 39% to 14.6p after it completed its exit from the Wipac business.

The business has been put into administration and most of its assets have been bought by a subsidiary of Wuhu Technology for 10.5mln.

The net proceeds from the sale will be applied by the administrators to reduce the outstanding liabilities owed to the creditors of Wipac Limited. About 3.5mln of the net proceeds will be paid by the administrator to the 's pension scheme and roughly 5.0mln will be used to reduce the outstanding drawn balance of the group's revolving credit facility.

() stormed 15% higher to 81p after revealing a 2.4mln expansion of study programmes with two large pharma client contracts.

The data analytics company that deliver insights in neuroscience said it has agreed around a 1.8mln extension to a Phase III study in Huntington's Disease (HD), previously announced in September 2018.

In addition, it continued, it has been awarded around a 0.6mln extension to a study programme in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), previously announced in October 2019.

IXICO reveals 2.4mln expansion of study programmes

() stormed 15% higher to 81p after revealing a 2.4mln expansion of study programmes with two large pharma client contracts.

The data analytics company that deliver insights in neuroscience said it has agreed around a 1.8mln extension to a Phase III study in Huntington's Disease (HD), previously announced in September 2018.

In addition, it continued, it has been awarded around a 0.6mln extension to a study programme in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), previously announced in October 2019.

PowerHouse Energy Group PLC () slipped 4% to 0.47p after the waste-to-energy company said it is in talks to acquire its development partner, Waste2Tricity (W2T).

The acquisition would be in the form of a non-cash transaction using PowerHouse shares to acquire the whole of the issued share capital of W2T, at a ratio of 60% PowerHouse to 40% W2T.

The directors of PowerHouse believe that the enlarged company would be better understood by its customers and investors.

Shares in Rightmove wannabe () fell 4.0% to 73p after it placed shares at 70p each, raising 3.4mln.

The property listings website also announced it is to take a 20% stake in Glanty, the owner and developer of 'teclet', an automated portal for the lettings industry that is designed to reduce overheads and maximise efficiencies for lettings agents.

The 20% stake will cost OnTheMarket 797,000, spread over 10 months.

The fizz went out of () the shares were down 16% at 1,435p after it flagged new soft drink taxes in the Middle East.

The companys flagship product, Vimto, is a popular drink in the Muslim community during Ramadan and the concern is that sales of the drink will be hit by a recently implemented excise tax of 50% to be levied on the retail price of non-carbonated sweetened drinks in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

The Ramadan trading period accounts for roughly 80% of annual in-country revenues, Nichols revealed.

() late on Fridayunveiled plans to raise up to 3.25mln with backing from private and professional investors. A 1.5mln tranche is being undertakenvia the financial platform Primary bid at 8p a share, a 26% discount to the close last Thursday. Lombard Odier, meanwhile, will pay 1.75mln for 21.875mln Futura shares.

() the battery metals and energy storage company has announced a partnership deal with ion Ventures Ltd, an investor in and developer of energy storage and flexibility assets. In a statement, Regency - which is strategically focused around battery metals - said the parties have executed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to partner on Regency's existing pipeline of projects, with a view to identifying and prioritising the most commercially attractive projects, securing funding and then moving quickly to first cash flow.

Augmented and virtual reality investor PLC () has notched up its first realised gain with the sale of 3D artificial intelligence platform Artomatix. The investment was held by 25.9% owned associate Suir Valley Ventures (SVV) with the sale price a cash multiple of approximately five times its initial investment. will book a profit of 1.6mln from the sale.

() has signed its second exclusive distribution contract in a week for grape fungicide Mevalone. Italian group Sipcam will market, distribute and sell the product in Portugal and the Benelux region.

(), the data analytics company delivering insights in neuroscience, has got a pre-Christmas boost, revealing a 2.4mln expansion of study programmes with two large pharma client contracts. In a brief statement, the AIM-listed firm said it has agreed around a 1.8mln extension to a Phase III study in Huntington's Disease (HD), previously announced in September 2018. In addition, it continued, it has been awarded around a 0.6mln extension to a study programme in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), previously announced in October 2019.

() said its interim results revealed the CBD specialists seed to shelf strategy was working, with the companys chief executive upbeat on the prospects for next year. Shareholders have come to know me for my conservative approach and I am not one for grand predictions but I remain confident that our multi-channel sales approach can bring success to our company, said Nick Tulloch in commentsaccompanying its first-half update.

Just in time for a bit of last-minute Christmas shopping for the devoted angler, () has opened a new store. It is located in Swinton, Greater Manchester and brings the total number of Angling Direct stores across the UK to 34, ten of which have been opened this year.

Minds + Machines Group Limited (), the top-level domain registry company, has revealed that it has continued to trade well in the fourth quarter as it announced the completed renegotiation of an onerous legacy contract. In a brief statement, the group said that further to its announcement of 18 July 2019, all existing and future liabilities, estimated at US$7.9mln, arising from that contract have been settled through a single one-off payment of US$5.1mln.

U.S. Oil & Gas PLC (USOIL) told investors that it is presently preparing applications for permits to drill three new wells. The company said it hopes to drill a well in the first quarter of 2020, subject to regulatory approvals, and subsequent drilling would depend upon the outcome of the first well

() has told investors it has kicked off a new drill programme at the Baita Plai polymetallic minein Romania. Findings from the programme will be used to further define the grades and resource, the company said. It will support existing efforts to confirm a JORC compliant resource statement for the project. Operations are advancing at Baita Plai where the cold commissioning of new mine operations also started last week.

() has updated on the Horse Hill oil project where the new horizontal well has completed its initial flow testing period, showing positive rates but also a requirement for certain interventions. Fellow Horse Hill stakeholder () highlighted that the new horizontal well initially flowed at some 1,087 barrels of fluid per day during clean-up with oil cuts of up to 60%.

() is looking forward to commencing phase 2 of its drilling programme at the Namibia Tantalite Investment (NTI) Mine. In its final results statement covering the year to the end of June, the Namibia-focused company said Phase 2 exploration step-out drilling should be completed in the first half of 2020 and is expected to identify further mineral resources.

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Carclo motors after it completes exit from Wipac business - Proactive Investors UK

Whether or not Hal will one day refuse to 'open the pod bay doors' IRL will depend on the research goals the field of artificial intelligence (AI) sets for itself.

Supercomputer: HAL 9000 is a fictional artificial intelligence character and the main antagonist in the Space Odyssey series.

Currently, the field is not prioritising the goal of developing a flexible, general purpose intelligent system like HAL. Instead, most efforts are focused on building specialised AI systems that perform well often much better than humans in highly restricted domains.

These are the AI systems that power Googles search, Facebooks news feed and Netflixs recommendation engine; answer phones at call centres; translate natural languages from one to another; and even provide medical diagnoses. So the portrait of AI that Stanley Kubrick developed in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, while appropriate for the time (after all, Kubricks film came out in 1968), appears pretty outdated in light of current developments.

That is not to say a superhuman general intelligence like HAL could not be built in principle, although what exactly it would take remains an open scientific question. But from a practical perspective, it seems highly unlikely that anything like HAL will be built in the near future either by academic researchers or industry.

The future of AI is probably more accurately depicted by a toaster that knows when you want to eat breakfast in the morning, than anything resembling a super intelligence like HAL.

Does this mean that artificial intelligence and other related fields like machine learning and computational neuroscience have nothing interesting to offer? Far from it. Its just that the goals have changed.

Artificial intelligence these days is more closely connected to the rapidly growing fields of machine learning, neural networks, and computational neuroscience. Major tech companies like Google and Facebook, among many others, have been investing heavily in these areas in recent years and large in-house AI research groups are quickly becoming the norm.A perfect example of this is Google Brain.

So AI isnt going anywhere, its just being transformed and incorporated into quite literally everything from internet search to self-driving cars to 'intelligent' appliances. The future of AI is probably more accurately depicted by a toaster that knows when you want to eat breakfast in the morning, than anything resembling a super intelligence like HAL.

Virtually everything in the popular media today about AI concerns deep learning. These algorithms work by using statistics to find patterns in data, and they have revolutionised the field of AI in recent years. Despite their immense power and ability to match, and in many cases exceed, human performance on image categorisation and other tasks, there are some things at which humans still excel.

For instance, deep convolutional neural networks must be trained on massive amounts of data, far more than humans require to exhibit comparable performance. Moreover, network training must be supervised in the sense that when the network is learning, each output the network produces for a given input is compared against a stored version of the correct output. The difference between actual and ideal provides an error signal to improve network performance.

Incredible brainpower: AI software has been designed with cognitive abilities similar to those of the human brain, explain Crossley and Kaplan.

And yet humans can learn to do a remarkable variety of things like visually categorise objects and drive cars based on relatively small data sets without explicit supervision. By comparison, a deep neural network might require a training set of millions of images or tens of millions of driving trials, respectively.

The critical question is, how do we do this? Our brains are powerful neural networks shaped by millions of years of evolution to do unsupervised, or better, self-supervised, learning sometimes on the basis of limited data. This is where AI will be informed by ongoing work in the cognitive science and neuroscience of learning.

Cognitive science is the study of how the brain gives rise to the many facets of the mind, including learning, memory, attention, decision making, skilled action, emotion, etc. Cognitive science is therefore inherently interdisciplinary. It draws from biology, neuroscience, philosophy, physics, psychology, among others.

In particular, cognitive science has a long and intimate relationship with computer science and artificial intelligence. The influence between these two fields is bidirectional. AI influences cognitive science by providing new analysis methods and computational frameworks with which neural and psychological phenomena can be crisply described.

Will artificial intelligence ever match or surpass human intelligence on every dimension? At the moment, all we can do is speculate, but a few things seem unambiguously true.

Cognitive science is at the heart of AI in the sense that the very concept of "intelligence" is fundamentally entangled with comparisons to human behaviour, but there are much more tangible instances of cognitive science influencing AI. For instance, the earliest artificial neural nets were created in an attempt to mimic the processing methods of the human brain.

More recent and further advanced artificial neural nets (e.g., deep neural nets) are sometimes deeply grounded in contemporary neuroscience. For instance, the architecture of artificial deep convolutional neural nets (the current state of the art in image classification) is heavily inspired by the architecture of the human visual system.

The spirit of appealing to how the brain does things to improve AI systems remains prevalent in the current AI research (e.g., complimentary learning systems, deep reinforcement learning, training protocols inspired by "memory replay" in the hippocampus), and it is common for modern AI research papers to include a section on biological plausibility that is, how closely matched are the workings of the computational system to what is known about how the brain performs similar tasks.

This all raises an interesting question about the frontiers of cognitive science and AI. The reciprocity between cognitive science and artificial intelligence can be seen even at the final frontier of each discipline. In particular, will cognitive science ever fully understand how the brain implements human cognition, and the corresponding general human intelligence?

And back to our a version of our original question about HAL: Will artificial intelligence ever match or surpass human intelligence on every dimension?

At the moment, all we can do is speculate, but a few things seem unambiguously true. The continued pursuit of how the brain implements the mind will yield ever richer computational principles that can inspire novel artificial intelligence approaches. Similarly, ongoing progress in AI will continue to inspire new frameworks for thinking about the wealth of data in cognitive science.

Dr Matthew Crossley is a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University working on category and motor learning. Dr David Kaplan is a researcher in the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University working on motor learning and the foundations of cognitive science.

Understanding cognition, which includes processes such as attention, perception, memory, reading and language, is one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time. The new Bachelor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences degree the only one of its kind in Australia provides a strong foundation in the rapidly growing fields of cognitive science, neuroscience and computation.

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Will there ever be a supercomputer that can think like HAL? - Macquarie University