CategoryMedicine and Health
Confronting IVF: Human Embryos Are Persons With a Right to Life
We humans are persons even when we are non-sentient and dependent on othersNeuroscientist: 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 agoAre 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”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 accurateNear-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 laterProf: 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 laterPrehistoric 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 goodsPalliative 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 deathBook 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 beLast 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 ›
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 hybridsWhy 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 birthEmbattled 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 ›
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 interferenceIn 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 ›
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 spiritUCLA 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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 onesWe 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 ›