The Cortical Column

These fascinating images have long since fallen into the Public Domain. This image dates to 1619. Here's the reference: Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris […] historia, tomus II (1619), tractatus I, sectio I, liber X, De triplici animae in corpore visione I believe "Mundus Intellectualis" translates to "Intellectual Globe," e.g., a map of the intellect, or consciousness.

Let's cut straight to the numbers: We represented a rat-scale cortical model (55 million neurons, 442 billion synapses) in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor BlueGene/L Dharmendra Modha of IBM's Blue Brain project presented these results yesterday at the Supercomputing 2007 Conference in a paper titled "Anatomy of a Cortical Simulator." (pdf) This is by far the largest simulation in the history of computational neuroscience, trumping their previous mouse-scale model ...

I've always wondered about the properties of intelligence of extraterrestrial life (ET). The question is similar to Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat? (Google)," except perhaps more extreme. The Drake Equation tells us there are likely to be roughly 3 other civilizations in our galaxy alone (Edge Foundation). In our search for ET we typically look for Earth-like planets, based on their spectroscopic profile ...

It's been known that cannabis greatly increases the risk of developing paranoid schizophrenia since 1987, when Lancet published his article, "Cannabis and schizophrenia. A longitudinal study of Swedish conscripts." In a Nature review published today, titled "Cannabis, the mind and society: the hash realities" (subscription required), Murray et al., explain the leading hypothesis behind this increased risk: How might cannabis cause psychotic symptoms? Acutely psychotic patients show ...

Note: This entry was initially going to be a comment to the Cognitive Daily post, "Is there wisdom in crowds?" But as you can see, it is far too long to be a comment :) The precursor to Wikipedia was Nupedia. It was run by Larry Sanger, a proper epistemologist. It had a seven point review process, as stringent as the Encyclopedia Britannica, if not moreso. Over three ...

I always love the questions that the Edge Foundation's World Question Center comes out with. This time, they asked 88 leading scientists, thinkers and visionaries "What is your formula? Your algorithm? Your equation?" Although you may not agree with all of the responses, it's well worth going through them. Here are my favorites: Max Tegmark tells us why there are three dimensions of space and one of time, with ...

Schiff et al. recently described a method whereby deep brain stimulation (DBS) is applied to the intralaminar nuclei of the thalamus, critical for attention and arousal. Within 48 hours, a patient with widespread cerebral damage awoke from a six year coma. DBS is unfortunately a highly invasive surgery, and given our speculative knowledge of neuroscience, these electrical fields often amount to a shock in the dark. But is DBS ...

Narrated by cosmologist Martin Rees, the fantastic video "Are we Real?" entertains the beginnings and ends of our current knowledge of reality. From brain science to the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, it paints a picture that is often easy to forget. That the true nature of our universe may literally be inaccessible to us. The MWI prohibits communication between alternate worlds, so it might be that ...