Author Archives: alenas
Who’s afraid of germs? Apparently, plants are.
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Synesthesia, a Real-life Superpower
Have you ever wanted to have night vision, or Clark Kent’s super-hearing? Although those particular powers may be firmly set in the realm of comic books, there are real people in the world with what many describe as a special ability; synesthesia.
Synesthesia is a phenomenon where one stimulus triggers two or more of the areas of the brain that deal with processing sensations. Basically, synesthetes (people who have synesthesia), have the sensation of tasting colors, seeing music or experiencing other, even more amazing examples of the blending of perception. A synesthete may taste raspberries just from seeing the color blue, or vice versa!
There are many different types of synesthesia, however the most prevalent is grapheme-color synesthesia, which means that someone associates color to a particular letter. Patricia Lynn, a writer and a famous synesthete, explains how she sees text:
“For as long as I could remember, each letter of the alphabet had a different color. Each word had a different color too… and so did each number. The colors of letters, words and numbers were as intrinsic a part of them as their shapes, and like the shapes, the colors never changed.”
How synesthetes with grapheme – color synesthesia might see these letters.
Besides being a cool get-to-know-you fact, synesthesia can have practical benefits. Patricia explains how synesthesia helped her learn her letters as a child: “[To] make an ‘R’, all I had to do was first write a ‘P’ and then draw a line down from its loop. … I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange one just by adding a line,”. Other perks include having a better memory for certain tasks, or identifying musical notes more easily thanks to this biological quirk.
Like many other synesthetes, Patricia went a large part of her life without knowing that the way she saw the world was unique. This fact has somewhat impeded our ability to study what is going in the brains of people with synesthesia; potential subjects don’t know that they are different from others. Worse still is that just a few decades ago, those who actually realized they could feel what others didn’t would be labeled as having an overly-active imagination. Knowledge about this phenomenon was just too niche and most did not believe that this is how synesthetes legitimately saw the world.
Thankfully, that’s changed in the past few decades. We now have a better understanding of what is happening when, say, a dog barking sets of a display of fireworks in the mind of the synesthete. In the average brain, all the major regions are quite predictably interconnected; our functional networks are hooked up to give us the every-day perception of reality (how dull!). One theory states that unlike us, people who have synesthesia have significantly greater connectivity between two or several of their perceptual centers . Say, a person who experiences music as sensations in their body would have a greater amount of connectivity between the auditory and somatosensory (the part that processes touch) centers of the brain. How this occurs is still mostly a mystery.
Steffie Tomson (Synesthesia Researcher) [Creative Commons attribution licence]
Although almost all synesthetes are born with their ability, there have been incidents of people getting synesthesia as a result of brain trauma. Although I would love to see songs give me a personal visual display when I go dancing, I don’t think I’d ever resort to such extreme measures.
Written and published by Alena Safina
A Speedbump on the Road to Singularity
From the time of their humble origins as slow, hole-punching behemoths, few could have predicted that computers would completely transform our modern age so profoundly. In more recent times, as computing power keeps increasing year by year, many have begun to seriously consider the possibility that soon the computer may outperform the human mind in almost all tasks, not simply in playing chess or conducting assembly lines.
A prominent crusader of these ideas, Ray Kurzweil, goes so far as to claim that one day in the not-so-distant future, we may download the contents of our minds: memories, personality, emotions and preferences into a computer. In effect we would reach immortality by merging with a machine. This rather simplistic view is part of the concept of the technological singularity, the notion that computers will become increasingly more powerful and smarter until a point in time when they will radically change the way humans live and function in the world.
To predict that downloading yourself to a computer will be possible, we’d have to rely on many broad assumptions about the human mind. One such assumption we’d need to make is already used as the starting point of modern neuroscience; that our minds, our internal experience of the world, and the rest of the function of the brain is the total of all neural activity.
Scientists know that the brain uses its cells, specifically the connections between neurons, to conduct simple calculations. Basically, this explains consciousness as the output of a biological computer, which uses the principles similar to those in mathematics to create every thought, feeling, insight and perception that we have ever had. Sounds simple? Hardly. While the bare principles are easy to understand, the sheer immensity and complexity of the brain, is well, massive. The current estimate on the raw computing power is that it’s the equivalent of around 10 000 000 000 000 000 operations per second.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Here is where the unlikely duo of Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist, and Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist, call singularians on their fault. They criticize their ultra-reductionist view based on their Orch OR theory of consciousness. In part, they have proposed that not only does the brain act as a classical computer (the kind that uses bits; ones and zeros), it also has a more fundamental, sub-cellular level found in the microtubule cytoskeleton, that uses quantum effects to do a completely different kind of computation, incompatible with today’s computing knowledge.
So not only does the brain compute with its 10 000 000 000 000 000 operations per second, each neuron’s microtubules may be able to compute at 100 trillion operations per second, giving the brain a grand total of 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 trillion operations per second. That’s twenty-seven zero’s! For comparison, the K computer, one of the world’s fastest, can only compute 10 000 trillion calculations per second.
If the Orch OR theory proves to be correct, then the singularity is still just a dim blip on our radar, not the impeding revolution that some of its proponents suggest. Of course that’s assuming that we can program these incredibly fast computers to be smart. After all, having enough processing power on its own will not spontaneously give us artificial intelligence. That will be a job for the neuroscientists and programmers of the distant future.
Written and published by Alena Safina
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Posted in Biological sciences, Science in the news
Tagged Computing, Consciousness, Orch OR theory, Singularity
Printing the Sum of Our Parts
You don’t have to know anyone with a failed organ to understand what kind of stress they must go through while they’re on the organ transplant waiting list. Many don’t live to see the end of that line-up and heartbreakingly, the ones who make it are still at danger from organ rejection. Thankfully, a solution is on the horizon. In the near future, all a patient has to do is wait for their kidney or liver to be printed, 3D printed that is.
You may have heard a thing or two about 3D printers, the method of manufacturing an object, layer by layer, guided by a digital model of what you wish to print. While it may seem complicated enough to print plastics or metal into complex shapes, scientists and engineers are now working on creating ways to print fully functional organs.
We’ve had the ability to print tissues (hyperlink) made of a single type of cell for some time now, but the possibility of producing entire organs is now on the horizon, most notably, the human liver.
However, there are still many major milestones to reach before the first printed organ can be transplanted to a donor. Currently, the greatest tissue thickness that can be printed is about a centimeter; adding more layers causes the tissue to suffocate from lack of oxygen and nutrients. Only once a way to incorporate blood vessels into the tissue is developed will there be serious talk of transplantation.
Nevertheless, we are already beginning to reap the benefits of these techniques. The thin pieces of functioning liver tissue are being used as ‘organs on a chip’ in testing new drugs. This means we can finally begin moving away from animal testing, without sacrificing reliability of animal models. In fact, such ‘organs on a chip’ save money and resources for medical research. Finally, something both PETA and pharmaceutical companies can be happy about.
As for clinical applications in humans, the current state looks rather disheartening; so far, only 3D printed implants have been used. However, for the thousands currently in line for a transplant, this technology offers reason to hope.
Published by Alena Safina
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Posted in Biological sciences, Issues in science, Science communication, Uncategorized
Tagged 3D Printing, Drug testing, Organ transplantation
