Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

CategoryMedicine and Health

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blue sky ocean

Are Near-Death Experiences Just Another Branch of Research Now?

We should hope so because there are a number of interesting allied research areas that would be better studied without preexisting prejudice against NDEs
In a discussion at Psychology Today, a philosopher notes that her dissertation supporting the reality of near-death experiences was received without hostility. Read More ›
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Human fetus with internal organs, 3d illustration

Confronting IVF: Human Embryos Are Persons With a Right to Life

We humans are persons even when we are non-sentient and dependent on others
IVF is the industrial manufacture of human beings. The right to life of the embryo is a bulwark against dehumanization for all. Read More ›
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A team of surgeons performing brain surgery to remove a tumor.

Neuroscientist: Human Brain More Complex Than the Models Show

The weird “homunculus” — the way the brain maps the body — was pioneer neurosurgeons’ best guess nearly a century ago
We shouldn’t be surprised if the brain is more complex than could be known earlier. Most modern research into human beings is turning out that way. Read More ›
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Vitro Fertilization. IVF with DNA strand. 3d illustration.

Are IVF Human Embryos “Children”? A Recent Court Decision

Neurologist Steven Novella claims that the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that they are “children” under the law “essentially referenced god”
The ruling not only did not reference God, it was meticulously based on precedent. So those who seek to remove protection from IVF embryos must lobby for that. Read More ›
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Emergency Department: Doctors, Nurses and Paramedics Push Gurney / Stretcher with Seriously Injured Patient towards the Operating Room.

Near Death: Why Corroborated NDEs Can’t Just Be Explained Away

In some cases, Gary Habermas recounts, patients who had NDEs while in a state of clinical death report dates and numbers that are later found to be accurate
Materialist explanations for near-death experiences are much less satisfactory than simply accepting that the mind can act independently of the brain Read More ›
A man going through the dark old tunnel. Tunnel with traffic lights and a silhouette of a man

Near-Death: What People Learn When They Are (Briefly) Dead

In this excerpt, Prof Gary Habermas reports that sometimes the returned experiencer says that someone else has died — but the official news only comes later
For reasons that are not yet clear, blind people can see during a near-death experience and details have been confirmed. Habermas relates some cases. Read More ›
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Women, man and hospital bed in motion blur of emergency surgery, healthcare wellness or risk condition operation. Doctors, nurses and medical workers with patient in busy er, theatre room or teamwork

Prof: There’s a Growing Number of Verified Near-Death Experiences

Gary Habermas notes more than 110 NDEs where experiencers’ detailed reports of what they saw when they were flatlined have been corroborated later
It’s exceedingly unlikely, Prof. Habermas argues, that all these cases result from misperception deception, coincidences, or mistakes. Read More ›
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The archaeologist is digging

Prehistoric Children with Down Syndrome Were Valued, Burials Show

The six found so far from one culture, identified by DNA evidence, did not live long but they were buried with grave goods
Today, when children with Down syndrome can grow up, they can display remarkable abilities, as the story of the Edmonton Oilers’ Joey Moss shows. Read More ›
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A young woman holding the hand of an old woman in a hospital bed, black and white

Palliative Care Doctor: What Dying Feels Like

Although a dying person tends to spend more and more time asleep or unconscious, there may be a surge of brain activity just before death
Fifty years ago slick commentators expected to explode myths about the soul or the hereafter but today, NDEs and terminal lucidity are serious research topics. Read More ›
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Anonymous call

Book Banning Today: Silently … Not Like in the Old Days

Traditional anti-book banning groups are simply not where the action is and maybe don’t want to be

Last week we looked at the way censorship in the age of the internet is typically invisible. It’s not the police raiding bookstores; it’s — for example — sudden downranking of posts so that information that might have reached millions of people reaches only dozens. Constantly suppressed, it can’t go viral. We can see the change more clearly if we look at the difference between how books (and other information) used to get banned and how they get banned today. Book banning before the internet When the word “book bans” is used today, it usually means something different from what it meant even a few decades ago. Ulysses, a groundbreaking work by Irish novelist James Joyce (1882–1941) was indeed banned Read More ›

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X ray female head with implanted micro chip - 3d Illustration

Will Neuralink’s Brain Implant Help Paralysis Victims?

Addressing disabilities like paralysis, limb loss, and blindness seems a more realistic goal than the hyped (and feared) human–machine hybrids
When Elon Musk announced his first implant recipient late last month, a broad public first learned that many people with disabilities use implants now. Read More ›
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A DNA testing kit. Generative AI

Why Is 23andMe — the Hot Gene Testing Startup — Now Worthless?

Birthed in Silicon Valley among high-tech go-getters, it should still be steaming along, right? But traditional bedrock business realities cursed it at its birth

Embattled genetic testing outfit 23andMe had a customer base of 14 million for its home DNA testing kits. Thus, many of us know at least someone who has discovered a partial Mongolian, West African, or even Neanderthal ancestry via the famous “spit kit.” The 2006 startup, birthed in Silicon Valley and riffing off the Human Genome Project (2000), had a dazzling “the future is now!” launch. The founder, Anne Wojcicki (pronounced as if “Wojisky”), was the daughter of “Godmother of Silicon Valley” Esther Wojcicki and sister of YouTube’s former CEO, Susan Wojcicki. For a time, she was married to Google co-founder Sergei Brin and had plenty of billionaire backers. Thus 23andMe raised $1.4 billion in funding. So why has the Read More ›

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human memory loss

Forget Stuff? Relax. Your Mind Is Likely Functioning As It Should

Recent research suggests that memories can sometimes be in a “dormant” stage due to interference

In recent years, a significant amount of research has been done on memory, including research on how we forget and why. A memory is stored as an engram, a physical trace of memory in the brain. Forgetting means losing or losing track of that trace. A great deal of the research on engrams has been done on mice because their memories, whether retrieved, forgotten, or erased, tend to be simple and easy to interpret. A recent article in The Scientist looked at some new mouse research on forgetting, which provides some reassuring results. University of Alberta neurobiologist Jacob Berry explained that a 2023 open-access study is actually still there, even when it can’t be retrieved due to some interference: “It’s Read More ›

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peaceful nature

Psychiatrist Looks at Mindfulness From a Christian Perspective

UCLA research psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz notes that the word “heart” in the biblical sense means the seat of consciousness, the seat of our spirit

UCLA research psychiatrist Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz adapts Buddhist concepts of mindfulness to the Western Christian tradition. One of the leading experts in neuroplasticity, he spoke on the topic at the Table Conference at Biola University’s Center for Christian Thought in 2014. His talk, “Mind Your Heart,” is worth revisiting: At the time, the practice of mindfulness, which is thousands of years old, had also become something of a fad, making the February 3, 2014 cover of Time Magazine. Since then, it continues to attract serious adherents from all philosophies and religions who want to learn to experience what really matters. Some highlights of his talk: ● [2:29] Basically we are just now coming out of the era in which all Read More ›

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Senior lady with her aged mother with dementia, embracing and smiling in a summer park

New Studies Point to Ways We Might Reduce the Effects of Dementia

A recent study of the relationship between personality type and the impairments of dementia has produced some intriguing findings. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Northwestern University analyzed data from eight studies in the literature comprising over 44,000 people. Of these, 1,703 developed dementia. They were trying to find out what effect the Big Five personality traits — conscientiousness, extraversion, openness to experience, neuroticism, and agreeableness — had on the progress of dementia. They studied both performance on cognitive tests and brain autopsies: The researchers found that high scores on negative traits (neuroticism, negative affect) and low scores on positive traits (conscientiousness, extraversion, positive affect) were associated with a higher risk of a dementia diagnosis. High scores on Read More ›

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Brain: network of astrocytes (glial cells that support neurons).

New Findings About Our Mysterious “Second Brain”

It wasn’t long ago that researchers were hardly aware of the way the digestive system functions as a second brain. The big focus was neurons. But, along with neurons, both the central nervous system and the digestive system make extensive use of glial cells, whose function has not been as well understood. Glial cells, which do not produce electrical impulses, were considered “electrophysiologically boring.” We now know that they support neurons in both physical and chemical ways. In the gut, they co-ordinate immune responses From the Francis Crick Institute, we learn: … the enteric nervous system is remarkably independent: Intestines could carry out many of their regular duties even if they somehow became disconnected from the central nervous system. And Read More ›

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Inside the brain. Concept of neurons and nervous system.

Our Brains Don’t Really Rewire, Neuroscientists Caution

Professors Tamar Makin (Cambridge) and John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins) say that when the brain adapts to losses, it uses “latent capacities,” not new ones

We hear a lot about neuroplasticity, — the way the brain compensates for absences or injuries. A recent neuroscience paper offers a look at what the brain is really doing in such cases. One area that has attracted a lot of attention is human echolocation, the ability of a person who is blind — due to damage to the visual cortex of the brain — to use a form of echolocation to sense objects that cannot actually be seen. Professors Tamar Makin (Cambridge) and John Krakauer (Johns Hopkins) propose that what happens in the brain is something like this: In their article, Makin and Krakauer look at a ten seminal studies that purport to show the brain’s ability to reorganise. Read More ›

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Heart shaped pill between rows of standard pills

Everyday Evidence of the Mind’s Reality: the Placebo Effect

The placebo effect — you get better because you think you will — may be getting stronger, as researchers manipulate it more effectively
Remember, if the mind is merely what the brain does and has no independent power, the placebo effect should not exist at all. And yet … Read More ›
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Photo taken of a heartbeat on the monitor

Yes, the Film on Near-Death Experiences Is Another “Hated Hit”

As with Sound of Freedom, critics trashed After Death but audiences loved it. And the critics just aren’t keeping up with the science
When even science mags are not trashing near-death researchers, critics who just assume it’s all bunk should really just get out more. Read More ›
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Medical drip in hospital corridor

Assisted Suicide and the Dangers of “Word Engineering”

When radical policies are proposed, the first step is to change the lexicon to make it seem less extreme, even mundane.
If people don’t kill themselves because of concern about stigma, isn’t that good? I mean, shouldn’t we want fewer people to commit suicide? Read More ›