Does our mind influence the world, separate from our actions? Usually the way we influence the world is with our physical movements: whether it’s the movement of our hands in manipulating objects, or verbal utterances that influence the movements of others. But does simply paying attention in a particular way change something about the physical world, without you or anyone else actually moving in order to make that change? The answer to this question has to be yes, for reasons that I will e...| kasra.io
Mechanical neural networks: Architected materials that learn behaviors A synthetic protein-level neural network in mammalian cells A cell signaling model as a trainable neural nanonetwork Single cortical neurons as deep artificial neural networks The neuron computing an XOR function: Dendritic action potentials and computation in human layer 2/3 cortical neurons Gene regulatory networks exhibit several kinds of memory: Quantification of memory in biological and random transcriptional networks...| kasra.io
For experiments showing consciousness during non-REM sleep using serial awakenings, see Early-night serial awakenings as a new paradigm for studies on NREM dreaming and Assessing sleep consciousness within subjects using a serial awakening paradigm. For the discussion of dreamless sleep in Indian philosophy, see Evan Thompson’s paper Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness. For the argument that white dreams might not just be an instance of forgetting but might be reflective o...| kasra.io
This is a citation list accompanying my thread on the planarian worm. A clarification: there are actually hundreds of species of planarians, and despite being closely related, some of them are capable of the full-body regeneration described in the thread, while others have limited regenerative capacity, and still others show no regeneration at all. This divergence is itself a fascinating area of inquiry, as described in Evolutionary dynamics of whole-body regeneration across planarian flatworms.| kasra.io
