Biology

Trauma Exposure across the News Cycle and the Case for Biotypes of PTSD in War Journalists

Author: Sheeva Azma
Date: October, 2024
Area(s): Biology, Psychology
Text: PDF

This study examines the pervasive nature of trauma exposure in journalism and its impact across all stages of the news reporting cycle. Drawing from a comprehensive literature review, we highlight the significant gap in research on the neuroscience of journalism and journalist PTSD, despite the high prevalence of PTSD among war correspondents and photojournalists. We present a conceptual framework illustrating how primary and secondary trauma exposures occur during news gathering, reporting, and consumption phases. The study also reviews empirical findings on PTSD's effects on brain structure and function, identifying symptom subclusters and their associated brain regions. This knowledge informs the development of biotypes for more personalized and effective treatment strategies for journalists with PTSD while also emphasizing an urgent need for comprehensive support systems for journalists. This interdisciplinary approach uniting research in journalism, neuroscience, psychology, and organizational management, also advances the understanding of trauma in journalism and its broader implications for news consumption and societal trust in media institutions. Interventions that can support journalists’ mental well-being can also enhance the quality of news reporting and contribute to a more resilient and informed society.

A Paradigm for AI Consciousness

Author: Michael Johnson
Date: June, 2024
Area: Biology, Physical Sciences, Psychology, Scientific Ethics, Technology
Text: PDF, Substack

How can we create a container for knowledge about AI consciousness? This work introduces a new framework based on physicalism, decoherence, and symmetry. Major arguments include (1) atoms are a more sturdy ontology for grounding consciousness than bits, (2) Wolfram’s ‘branchial space’ is where an object’s true shape lives, (3) electromagnetism is a good proxy for branchial shape, (4) brains and computers have significantly different shapes in branchial space, (5) symmetry considerations will strongly inform a future science of consciousness, and (6) computational efficiency considerations may broadly hedge against “s-risk”.

Cilia Disorders in the Genomics Era: Historical Overview and Commentary on Ciliopathy Diagnostics

Author: Sani Eskinazi
Date: October, 2023
Area: Biology
Text: PDF, Substack

Motile and sensory (primary) cilia are organelles that are found on the surface of almost all cells. Defects in cilia cause a number of multi-organ diseases known as ciliopathies, which have clinically heterogeneous symptoms. This heterogeneity makes diagnosing cilia disorders challenging and clinicians often rely on genetic sequencing to delineate ciliopathies from other diseases. However, there is not a consensus on which sequencing tools are most optimal for ciliopathy diagnosis and research. This review demonstrates the increasing body of knowledge on cilia genomics and highlights that next-generation sequencing will be integral towards optimizing diagnostics for these heterogeneous and debilitating group of disorders.

Taxonomies of Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to the Universe of Minds

Author: Roman V. Yampolskiy
Date: October, 2023
Areas: Biology, Psychology, Technology
Text: PDF, Substack

This paper explores the landscape of potential mind architectures by initially conceptualizing all minds as software. Through rigorous analysis, we establish intriguing properties of this intellectual space, including its infinite scope, variable dimensions of complexity, and representational intricacies. We then provide an extensive review of existing taxonomies for mind design. Building on this foundation, the paper introduces 'Intellectology' as a new field dedicated to the systematic study of diverse forms of intelligence. A compendium of open research questions aimed at steering future inquiry in this nascent discipline is also presented.

Forager Facts

Author: David Youngberg and Robin Hanson
Date: August, 2023
Areas: Biology, Psychology, Social Sciences
Text: PDF, Substack

Using an anthropology database that details many groups, we summarize how our forager ancestors likely lived on a variety of metrics. Though we have long since ceased to live as hunter-gatherers, its psychological shadow likely still shapes us, and so we would try to understand that lifestyle as fully as possible.

Perspective: Focused-Ultrasound Guided Neuropeptide Delivery as a Novel Therapeutic Approach in Psychiatry

Authors: Manjushri Karthikeyan, Ahaana Shrivastava, Andrew Neff
Date: April, 2023
Areas: Biology, Psychology
Text: PDF, Substack

Although drugs are a critical component of mental healthcare, most have modest benefits and significant side effects. One way to develop a superior intervention would be to administer drugs with the spatial and temporal precision that better replicates natural diversity within neurotransmitter systems. A technology called focused-ultrasound (FU) may be able to safely and transiently disrupt the blood-brain barrier with spatial precision, permitting the site-specific delivery of molecules that do not conventionally cross the blood-brain barrier. If this method is proven to be safe and effective in larger human trials, it may trigger a paradigm shift in biopsychology research where the level of precision with which neurotransmitter systems can be influenced is massively increased. In this article, we use the example of oxytocin in the treatment of Autism. We propose that intranasal administration is not highly effective because it leads to oxytocin’s wide dispersion throughout the brain, failing to specifically stimulate oxytocin’s prosocial effects in specific regions. Consequently, we hypothesize that site-specific delivery of oxytocin, particularly in brain regions such as the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Tegmental Area, would lead to more consistent benefits.

Will general antiviral protocols always be science fiction?

Date: December, 2022
Author: Rick Sheridan
Area: Biology
Text: PDF, Substack

Currently, antiviral drugs are targeted at specific viruses, requiring extensive research to develop de novo before a trial molecule is approved for a single viral target. However, it is possible that a strategic asset for mainstreaming antivirals has been hiding in plain sight. In our recent article published in Frontiers in Pharmacology, we explored the scope for plant-derived polyphenols, such as flavonoids, to be applied against infections spanning phylogenetically unrelated virus families. Beyond a long history of safe use in ordinary diet, common polyphenols also feature promiscuous binding behavior, a quality echoed by laboratory evidence that many are effective in vitro against viruses from diverse genera. Moreover, we mapped the research base undergirding the inflammatory response’s tendency to selectively return serum polyphenols from their latent, metabolized form back into their active, promiscuously-binding form uniquely at sites of inflammation -- such as those routinely established by viral infections. Verifying efficacy of flavonoids to constitute an annually-updated general antiviral protocol will require mobilizing a spectrum of animal model studies and clinical trials for initial confirmation.

What are the Red Flags for Neural Network Suffering?

Authors: Marius Hobbhahn, Jan Kirchner
Date: September, 2022
Areas: Biology, Scientific Ethics, Technology
Text: PDF, Substack

Which kind of evidence would we need to see to believe that artificial neural networks can suffer? We review neuroscience literature, investigate behavioral arguments and propose high-level considerations that could shift our beliefs. Of these three approaches, we believe that high-level considerations, i.e. understanding under which circumstances suffering arises as an optimal training strategy, is the most promising. Our main finding, however, is that the understanding of artificial suffering is very limited and should likely get more attention.

Moral Weights of Animals, Considering Viewpoint Uncertainty

Authors: Richard Bruns, Jim Davies
Date: July, 2022
Areas: Biology, Scientific Ethics
Text: PDF, Substack

Many utilitarians would like a number to use to evaluate the moral impact of actions that affect animals. However, there is a great disagreement among scholars involved with animal ethics, both about how much different animals can suffer and how much that suffering morally matters. To illustrate this uncertainty, while showing as a proof of concept that it may be possible to produce useful estimates in spite of it, we ran a Monte Carlo simulation that samples the ranges of major viewpoints scholars hold in the field, to show a spread of uncertainty for how we should treat six representative animals: crickets, salmon, chickens, pigs, cows, and elephants. The results show that the uncertainty is very large, with a 90% confidence interval ranging between an animal having no value and being valued as much as a human being. More research, in the form of expert surveys and a thorough and rigorous literature review, would be required to produce better estimates, but as an illustration, we present 20% and 40% confidence intervals, as well as the median and geometric mean, based on weighting the theories according to our informal estimate of their prevalence in the literature.

What does it mean to represent? Mental representations as falsifiable memory patterns

Authors: Eloy Parra-Barrero, Yulia Sandamirskaya
Date: May, 2022
Areas: Biology, Psychology
Text: PDF

Representation is a key notion in neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI). However, a longstanding philosophical debate highlights that specifying what counts as representation is trickier than it seems. With this brief opinion paper we would like to bring the philosophical problem of representation into attention and provide an implementable solution. We note that causal and teleological approaches often assumed by neuroscientists and engineers fail to provide a satisfactory account of representation. We sketch an alternative according to which representations correspond to inferred latent structures in the world, identified on the basis of conditional patterns of activation. These structures are assumed to have certain properties objectively, which allows for planning, prediction, and detection of unexpected events. We illustrate our proposal with the simulation of a simple neural network model. We believe this stronger notion of representation could inform future research in neuroscience and AI.

Building a Brain: An Introduction to Narrative Complexity, a language & internal dialogue-based theory of human consciousness

Author: R. Salvador Reyes
Date: April, 2022
Areas: Biology, Psychology
Text: PDF, Substack

Narrative Complexity is an internal dialogue-based looping model of consciousness & behavior—one that provides a framework for effectively defining the specific (and central) role of language and inner speech within consciousness & cognition, and in turn, within the mechanisms of emotion & decision-making that consciousness & cognition help to govern. This introduction to the theory lays out some of its primary premises and outlines the model enough to demonstrate that it is novel, plausible, systematically comprehensive, and worth exploring in greater detail.

The Prospect of Extracting Brain-Region-Specific Exosomes in the Human Bloodstream

Authors: Evan Yang, Andrew Neff
Date: November, 2021
Area: Biology
Text: PDF, Substack

“Exosomes are small vesicles, secreted by eukaryotic cells, containing molecular cargo that reflects the biochemical composition of the origin cell, including protein and RNA. Once secreted, exosomes can enter the circulatory system and be found in blood, urine, and saliva. It has been hypothesized that because exosomes contain transmembrane proteins unique to their cell of origin, specific populations of exosomes could be non-invasively extracted from the bloodstream. The protein L1CAM may serve as a marker of neuronal exosomes. However, although “neuron-derived-exosomes'' could offer some specific information about in-vivo molecular neurobiology, this population of exosomes still provides a relatively noisy signal, including data on protein expression from a variety of different neuronal subpopulations. We argue that it may be possible to isolate brain-region-specific exosomes, and that data derived from these exosomes would provide a superior diagnostic tool.”