Lots of very intelligent people are putting lots of effort into mapping the brain’s networks. People are calling these sort of maps of which-neuron-is-connected-to-which-neuron ‘connectomes‘, and if you’re working on this stuff, you’re doing ‘connectomics‘. (Academics love coining new fields […]
Category: Research Ideas
Research Idea: TMS Sonar
TMS ‘Sonar’ for mapping brain region activity coupling Modern neuroscience is increasingly suggesting that a great deal of a person’s personality, pathology, and cognitive approach is encoded into which of their brain regions are activity-coupled together. That is to say, […]
Learning and Memory: location, location, location!
Not long ago, we knew very little about learning and memory. Sure, we understood the basic concepts– people could learn things, and then recall them later– but they were black box processes, obfuscated by the complexity of the brain. Everyone […]
Toward a new ontology of brain dynamics: neural resonance + neuroacoustics
The brain is extraordinarily complex. We are in desperate need of models that decode this complexity and allow us to speak about the brain’s fundamental dynamics simply, comprehensively, and predictively. I believe I have one, and it revolves around resonance.
Gene Expression as a comprehensive diagnostic platform
I’m pretty sure I’ve found the future of medical diagnosis– it’s elegant, accurate, immediate, mostly doctor-less, comprehensive, and very computationally intensive. I don’t know when it’ll arrive, but it’s racing toward us and when it hits, it’ll change everything. In […]
Brainstorm: Logarithmic Evolution Distance
Exponential advances in gene sequencing technology have produced an embarrassment of riches: we’re now able to almost trivially sequence an organism’s DNA, yet sifting meaning from these genomes is still an incredibly labor-intensive and haphazard task. For instance, consider the […]
A Suggested Model for Dark Energy
Edit, 8-17-23: A condensed restatement of my speculation on dark energy as a natural prediction of treating gravity as a nonlocal gauge theory: A long time ago (2008) I got really curious about dark energy. A common intuition pump is […]
The dark and murky effects of HFCS
I like America a lot. But lately I’ve been wondering, “what’s going on here?” The latest poll numbers are in, and I’m clearly not alone. The AP is now reporting that 81% of Americans think we’re on the wrong track. […]
Scientific Research (2/5: Anthropic Principle)
Working hypothesis: There are substantial arguments from Physics, Physical Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biology, and Entropy that intelligent life could only arise in a universe with exactly three macroscopic spacial dimensions. If that seems overly technical, I’m taking a stab at the […]
Scientific Research (1/5: Gut Flora)
I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with science: on one hand, it provides a uniquely privileged (and fascinating) look into the mechanisms of reality. On the other, the practice of science is often distorted by institutional and financial factors, […]