Category: Mind Power

For the second time in two years, entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk sat down with podcaster Joe Rogan to chat about the future of AI and its role in the symbiosis of man and machine.

In their conversation, Musk revealed that the secretive brain stimulation link startup Neuralink, which he co-founded, is close to starting testing in actual humans.

“We’re not testing people yet, but I think it won’t be too long,” Musk told Rogan. “We may be able to implant a neural link in less than a year in a person I think.”

The news comes after Musk teased in February that the brain-computer interface startup was working on an “awesome” new version.

In their conversation, Musk revealed that the secretive brain stimulation link startup Neuralink, which he co-founded, is close to starting testing in actual humans.

“We’re not testing people yet, but I think it won’t be too long,” Musk told Rogan. “We may be able to implant a neural link in less than a year in a person I think.”

The news comes after Musk teased in February that the brain-computer interface startup was working on an “awesome” new version.

Musk likened the process of his neural stimulation device zapping the brain to “kicking a TV.”

While that sounds violent, the goal is to restore brain functionality. For instance, those with Alzheimer’s could have their memories restored.

“It’s like a bunch of circuits and those circuits are broken,” Musk explained.

But the technology is still in its early stages.

“There’s still a lot of work to do,” Musk said. Referring back to his timeline of testing within a year, he noted that “we have a chance of putting a link in someone and having them be healthy and restoring some functionality that they’ve lost.”

Eventually, as Rogan mused about becoming one with machines in the distant future, Musk countered that we have to keep up.

“Even in a benign [AI] scenario we are being left behind,” Musk said. “So how do you go along for the ride? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

“We are already a cyborg to some degree,” Musk told Rogan. “You got your phone, you got your laptop… If you’re missing your phone, it feels like missing limb syndrome.”

Source: https://futurism.com/elon-musk-neuralink-human-brain-implant

A new study provides evidence that a school-based mindfulness intervention can reduce perceived stress and modulate activity in a brain region associated with responses to fear and stress. The findings have been published in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Clemens C.C. Bauer, the corresponding author of the study and a postdoctoral associate at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, told PsyPost that his clinical practice helped to inspire the current research.

“I was a practicing family doctor in Mexico and I repeatedly witnessed how the mind state of my patients was key to their well-being and recovery from illness,” he explained. “I believe that mind states proceed biological states more than previously thought.”
The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brain activity of a subset of 40 sixth graders who were enrolled in a randomized clinical trial examining the effect of mindfulness training.

In the trial, 99 students were randomly assigned to either receive mindfulness training every day for eight week or receive lessons about computer coding. The mindfulness curriculum, created by the nonprofit program Calmer Choice, was designed to encourage students to pay attention to their breath, and to focus on the present moment rather than thoughts of the past or the future.

The researchers measured activity in the amygdala as the students looked at pictures of faces expressing different emotions. Prior to the intervention, they found that students who reported greater stress tended to display greater activation in the right amygdala when viewing fearful facial expressions.

After the intervention, the children who received mindfulness training reported feeling less stress in daily life. These children also exhibited reduced right amygdala activation in response to fearful faces and stronger amygdala connectivity with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Students in the mindfulness training group also reported fewer negative feelings, such as sadness or anger, after the training.
“These findings provide the first evidence, at any age, of an amygdala neural mechanism related to stress reduction following mindfulness training, specifically a reduced magnitude of amygdala response to negative stimuli (and no relation to amygdala response to positive stimuli),” the researchers wrote in their study.

The study indicates that “mindfulness training recalibrates the automatic and unconscious response to fear, which leads to a ubiquitous resilience to stress,” Bauer told PsyPost. “It is easy to learn and can be practiced everywhere.”

“Like any other scientific study, these results are in need of replication in this age group as well as in other age groups. We still don’t know how long the effects of training last and how much practice is needed to create more long term changes. With larger studies, one can also address possible side effects that may come up during practice and possible alternatives or special approaches in vulnerable populations,” Bauer added.

The mindfulness curriculum used in the study sought to alter students’ mindsets about their stress and help them to refocus attention on the present moment. It did not include any spiritual or religious instruction.

“It is very important for the general public to understand that mindfulness training is a completely secular practice similar to basketball training or any other physical activity. In some circles, mindfulness has been linked to Eastern philosophies which may impede its upscaling into the general public school system so it would be nice that the term mindfulness starts to be treated as a secular term,” Bauer said.

Source: https://www.psypost.org/2020/03/neuroscience-study-indicates-mindfulness-training-can-recalibrate-the-brains-response-to-fear-in-school-kids-56285

There has never been a problem facing mankind more complex than understanding our own human nature. And no shortage of neat, plausible, and wrong answers purporting to plumb its depths.

Having treated many thousands of psychiatric patients in my career, and having worked on the American Psychiatric Association’s efforts to classify psychiatric symptoms (published as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-IV and DSM-5), I can affirm confidently that there are no neat answers in psychiatry. The best we can do is embrace an ecumenical four-dimensional model that includes all possible contributors to human functioning: the biological, the psychological, the social, and the spiritual. Reducing people to just one element – their brain functioning, or their psychological tendencies, or their social context, or their struggle for meaning – results in a flat, distorted image that leaves out more than it can capture.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was established in 1949 by the federal government in the United States with the practical goal of providing ‘an objective, thorough, nationwide analysis and reevaluation of the human and economic problems of mental health.’ Until 30 years ago, the NIMH appreciated the need for this well-rounded approach and maintained a balanced research budget that covered an extraordinarily wide range of topics and techniques.

But in 1990, the NIMH suddenly and radically switched course, embarking on what it tellingly named the ‘Decade of the Brain.’ Ever since, the NIMH has increasingly narrowed its focus almost exclusively to brain biology – leaving out everything else that makes us human, both in sickness and in health. Having largely lost interest in the plight of real people, the NIMH could now more accurately be renamed the ‘National Institute of Brain Research’.

This misplaced reductionism arose from the availability of spectacular research tools (eg, the Human Genome Project, functional magnetic resonance imaging, molecular biology, and machine learning) combined with the naive belief that brain biology could eventually explain all aspects of mental functioning. The results have been a grand intellectual adventure, but a colossal clinical flop. We have acquired a fantastic window into gene and brain functioning, but little to help clinical practice.

The more we learn about genetics and the brain, the more impossibly complicated both reveal themselves to be. We have picked no low-hanging fruit after three decades and $50 billion because there simply is no low-hanging fruit to pick. The human brain has around 86 billion neurons, each communicating with thousands of others via hundreds of chemical modulators, leading to trillions of potential connections. No wonder it reveals its secrets only very gradually and in a piecemeal fashion.

Genetics offers the same baffling complexity. For instance, variation in more than 100 genes contributes to vulnerability to schizophrenia, with each gene contributing just the tiniest bit, and interacting in the most impossibly complicated ways with other genes, and also with the physical and social environment. Even more discouraging, the same genes are often implicated in vulnerability to multiple mental disorders – defeating any effort to establish specificity. The almost endless permutations will defeat any easy genetic answers, no matter how many decades and billions we invest.

The NIMH has boxed itself into a badly unbalanced research portfolio. Playing with ‘cool’ brain and gene research toys trumps the much harder and less intellectually rewarding task of helping real people.

Contrast this current NIMH failure with a great success story from NIMH’s distant past. One of the high points of my career was sitting on the NIMH granting committee that funded psychotherapy studies in the 1980s. We helped to support the US psychologist Marsha Linehan’s research that led her to develop dialectical behavior therapy; the US psychiatrist Aaron T Beck’s development of cognitive therapy; along with numerous other investigators and themes. Subsequent studies have established that psychotherapy is as effective as medications for mild-to-moderate depression, anxiety, and other psychiatric problems, and avoids the burden of medication side-effects and complications. Many millions of people around the world have already been helped by NIMH psychotherapy research.

In a rational world, the NIMH would continue to fund a robust psychotherapy research budget and promote its use as a public-health initiative to reduce the current massive overprescription of psychiatric medication in the US. Brief psychotherapy would be the first-line treatment of most psychiatric problems that require intervention. Drug treatments would be reserved for severe psychiatric problems and for those people who haven’t responded sufficiently to watchful waiting or psychotherapy.

Unfortunately, we don’t live in a rational world. Drug companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year influencing politicians, marketing misleadingly to doctors, and pushing pharmaceutical treatments on the public. They successfully sold the fake marketing jingle that all emotional symptoms are due to a ‘chemical imbalance’ in the brain and therefore all require a pill solution. The result: 20% of US citizens use psychotropic drugs, most of which are no more than expensive placebos, all of which can produce harmful side-effects.

Drug companies are commercial Goliath with enormous political and economic power. Psychotherapy is a tiny David with no marketing budget; no salespeople mobbing doctors’ offices; no TV ads; no internet pop-ups; no influence with politicians or insurance companies. No surprise then that the NIMH’s neglect of psychotherapy research has been accompanied by its neglect in clinical practice. And the NIMH’s embrace of biological reductionism provides an unintended and unwarranted legitimization of the drug-company promotion that there is a pill for every problem.

A balanced NIMH budget would go a long way toward correcting the two biggest mental-health catastrophes of today. Studies comparing psychotherapy versus medication for a wide variety of mild to moderate mental disorders would help to level the playing field for the two, and eventually reduce our massive overdependence on drug treatments for nonexistent ‘chemical imbalances’. Health service research is desperately needed to determine best practices to help people with severe mental illness avoid incarceration and homelessness, and also escape from them.

The NIMH is entitled to keep an eye on the future, but not at the expense of the desperate needs of the present. Brain research should remain an important part of a balanced NIMH agenda, not its sole preoccupation. After 30 years of running down a bio-reductionistic blind alley, it is long past time for the NIMH to consider a biopsychosocial reset, and to rebalance its badly uneven research portfolio.

Source: https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2020/03/29/the-distorted-idea-of-cool-brain-research-is-stifling-psychotherapy/

One way to deter harmful recreational drug use by teenagers is to treat them like adults. Rather than simply tell them to “Just Say No” to alcohol, tobacco or illicit drugs, it may be more helpful to explain how these substances create unique risks for them — risks that arise due to the changing state of the adolescent brain.

It’s an approach recommended by Dr. Robert DuPont, the first director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, the second White House “drug czar” and the current head of the Institute for Behavior and Health.

Scientists have long recognized that people who use alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs while adolescents are far more likely to use more dangerous drugs in their 30s and 40s. Back in 1984, researchers writing in the American Journal of Public Health reported that “the use of marijuana is a good predictor of the use of more serious drugs only if it begins early” and that early drinking is a similar “predictor of marijuana use.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that Americans in their 30s and 40s who used recreational drugs as teenagers are the group most severely affected by opioid overdoses today.

Unfortunately, neither the media nor popular culture adequately informs young people about the neurological damage alcohol, nicotine, and marijuana can inflict on the brain. On the contrary, despite strong evidence that early recreational drug use increases the likelihood of future drug addiction, the media and today’s culture often describe marijuana use as an “organic,” “natural” approach to anxiety and stress management. Indeed, Northern Michigan University launched the nation’s first medicinal plant chemistry major, offering students the chance to focus on marijuana-related studies. What message does that send to the still-developing minds of college students?

One group is taking a non-traditional approach to convincing students otherwise.

One Choice is a drug prevention campaign developed for teenagers by the Institute for Behavior and Health. It relies on cutting-edge neuroscience to encourage young Americans to make decisions that promote their brain health.

Pioneered by Dr. DuPont, One Choice specifically advocates that adolescents make “no use of any alcohol, nicotine, marijuana or other drugs” for health reasons. The theory is that adolescents who make the decision not to use alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana at all — that make “One Choice” to avoid artificial, chemical brain stimulation — are far less likely to wind up addicted to drugs such as opioids later on.

The One Choice approach is evidence-based. In 2017, scientists at Mclean Hospital and Harvard Medical School published their findings on the impact of early substance use on cognitive development. They explained that the brains of teenagers are still developing and can be negatively impacted by substance use. Adolescent brains are still forming the communication routes that regulate motivation, stress and habit-formation well into adulthood. As such, it is easier for substances to hijack and alter those routes in developing brains than in adult brains.

Hindering the vital attributes of habit formation, stress management and motivational behavior can drastically affect a young person’s academic performance. Collectively, and in the long run, that can impair the competitiveness of a national economy. Thus, it is crucial that young Americans learn to prioritize brain health.

The timing for the innovative One Choice approach is propitious. Today’s young Americans are more interested in biology, psychology and health sciences than ever before. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the field of “health professions and related programs” is the second most popular major among college students, with psychology and biological or biomedical sciences following as the fourth and fifth most popular, respectively. By explaining developmental neuroscience to teenagers, One Choice engages young people on a topic of interest to them and presents the reality of a pressing public health issue, instead of throwing moral platitudes and statistics at them.

Pro-marijuana legalization organizations, such as the Drug Policy Alliance, agree: “The safest path for teens is to avoid drugs, doing alcohol, cigarettes, and prescription drugs outside of a doctor’s recommendations.” And certainly honesty, along with scientific accuracy, is critical if we are to persuade adolescents not to use drugs.

Brain health is critical to the pursuit of happiness. And leveraging scientifically accurate presentations and testimonies to convince young Americans to prioritize their own brain health early on can prevent future substance abuse.

Source: https://www.postbulletin.com/opinion/other_views/commentary-using-neuroscience-to-prevent-drug-addiction-among-teenagers/article_4c3ef834-ef62-5e0e-a878-a3e5aba36135.html