Category: Humans
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Hallucinations… Living… Senses as deprivation of your nature…
One hundred billion or so neurons are also incredibly fragile. If the tiniest thing goes wrong with a particular connection - maybe something misfires, or a certain neural pathway is blocked - things can fall apart very quickly. And, oddly enough, even without any injuries or structural malfunctions, the human brain can get weird all…
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Being hyper-social. Watching your mobile phone. Crossing the river. [Interactions in an unmovable world]
A new study of dysfunctional use of smart technology finds that the most addictive smartphone functions all share a common theme: they tap into the human desire to connect with other people. The findings, published in Frontiers in Psychology, suggest that smartphone addiction could be hyper-social, not anti-social. We all know people who, seemingly incapable…
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Gods… Society… Punishment… Freedom…
Today’s most popular religions have one thing in common: gods or supernatural laws (such as karma) that dictate moral behavior and punish transgressions. Act morally and these supernatural forces will reward you; break the rules and you’ll be punished. But moralizing gods seem to be quite rare in human history. Researchers know from ethnographies that…
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New neural networks. Predicting. Machines. Humans. (From wisdom to knowledge to data)
A new type of neural network made with memristors can dramatically improve the efficiency of teaching machines to think like humans. The network, called a reservoir computing system, could predict words before they are said during conversation, and help predict future outcomes based on the present. Memristors are a special type of resistive device that…
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Neutron stars colliding. Theories destroyed.
When during 2017 scientists recorded a rippling in space-time, followed within two seconds by an associated burst of light observed by dozens of telescopes around the globe, they had witnessed, for the first time, the explosive collision and merger of two neutron stars. The neutron star merger created gravitational waves - a squiggly distortion in…
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