Get Your Tin Foil Hats Ready! "I Can Read Your Mind" Becoming Reality - IMRAN™

Get Your Tin Foil Hats Ready! "I Can Read Your Mind" Becoming Reality - IMRAN™

Talk about mind-reading. Scientists have made an exciting discovery by mapping how our brains understand the meanings of words. This new map shows that our brains use similar categories to classify words, which helps us make sense of language.

The study, focused on English words, is a step towards understanding how our brains store language. By mapping brain cells’ responses to words, we can start building a “thesaurus of meaning.”  

Published in Nature, the research highlights how the auditory cortex processes word sounds, while the prefrontal cortex deciphers their meanings. Previous studies used brain imaging to map word meanings, but a team of researchers recorded real-time neuron activity in epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes.

Participants listened to sentences, and the scientists tracked which neurons fired. They found that specific neurons responded to words in similar categories, like actions or people. Words with related meanings, such as “mouse” and “rat,” triggered similar neuronal patterns.

Interestingly, the prefrontal cortex neurons distinguished words by meaning, not sound. For example, “son” activated family-related neurons, but “Sun” did not, despite sounding the same. As someone who speaks English, Urdu, Punjabi, and is learning French, it would be fascinating to literally "see" how multi-lingual people's neurons operate. 

These researchers could partially determine what participants heard by observing neuron activity, identifying general themes like animals, actions, and food. This detailed understanding of single-neuron activity is crucial for developing brain-computer interfaces to restore speech. 

Of course, the great risk to our freedoms would come from Big Brother literally being able to read our minds and know our thoughts. Add in the great power of Artificial Intelligence overlaid on these bio-medical, medical-imaging, and bio-engineering breakthroughs and.... I know what you're thinking. 

Just Kidding... Or, am I ?  :-)

<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02146-6" rel="noreferrer nofollow">www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02146-6</a>

© 2024 IMRAN™  

Photo Not Mine, see URL.

Don't Think (And) You'll Live Forever! - IMRAN™

I will be honest. I have never dreamed of living forever. Life would be so boring. It would take away the drive to achieve what I can, to change the world (for the better) any way I can, to savor every moment of magic in nature, and every trembling moment of ecstacy with a beloved, if our lives on earth were not time-limited.

At the same time, it had always seemed ironic and tragic to me that some of the worst people on the planet lived the longest lives, especially horrendous politicians. Think Ghaffar Khan and Wali Khan in Pakistan, Dick Cheney in the USA, and many others around the planet.

In parallel, it seemed like the very country that the rest of the world's people spend their life savings to come for higher education, the United States, has become a place where people embrace ignorance and parents seem to prefer their kids to be future burger-flippers and sewer-cleaners rather than doctors, engineers, and more. People in the land that sent man to the moon now have to be convinced the earth is NOT flat, and that dinosaurs were not around at the time of Jesus, on a planet that is definitely older than 5000 years!

Meanwhile, in countries like Pakistan too, on the opposite end of the economic and religious spectrum, it is the illiterate, poverty stricken who also tend to have the most children. And the vile fundamentalists and terrorists, often funded by the Saudi-friends of Donald Trump and George W. Bush (not to mention Obama and all US presidents), are the ones who blow up children in schools, in the name of Islam. How doubly and horribly ironic and tragic that the VERY first word revealed to Prophet Muhammad was not Jihad, or prayers, or Mecca, or preach, but Iqra, ...READ!

NOW comes scientific research that... excuse my saying this... I F(*&ING hope AND pray is proven wrong.

"Excessive brain activity linked to a shorter life!" yells the Washington Post story about it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/10/16/excessive-brain-activity-linked-shorter-life/

Not only shall the evil type leaders continue to live longer lives, the stupid and brain-dead shall live longer and together the vile leading the morons shall inherit the earth. God help us all!

© 2019 IMRAN™

Democrats Need To Wipe Their Servers Clean, of Clintons - IMRAN™

I do not belong to any political party. I vote on issues, not parties, not personalities. Never in history  have I seen such a group of unelectable & undeserving candidates, Democrats  & Republicans , for US Presidential elections !

I appreciated the Clinton Presidency (except for his sleazy behavior in the White House with Monica Lewinsky ). I originally liked George W. Bush  for not being as slick as the Democratic candidates and believed it was time for change. I could not believe America elected Bush a second term and let him do so much damage to the USA and the world. I voted for Obama , though he has been a big disappointment in the second term so far.

I think it is time for change, but when I look at the Republican candidates I find it hard to believe such a large field with so little to offer. But then I look at the scary front runner on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, and I get equally worried.

Much that I dislike many of the Republican candidates, I truly cannot like this woman, and would not trust her. I could still see her winning if the Republicans did not get their house in order. But with this non-stop display of being over-clever and actually doing more and more stupid things, Hillary  may become Democrats' liability if they keep all their eggs in her basket.

The Clintons got away with an unexplained murder (supposed suicide) of Vince Foster. They got away with other scandals. But her hubris and sense of entitlement to run top secret national security related emails through a private email server apparently kept in a bathroom is beyond dumb. And to make stupider jokes about it and to think only the media cares about the issue of these emails, when the FBI itself is investigating a potentially criminal lapse, is almost like her behaving evil like Dick Cheney  but coming across looking dumb like George W. Bush.

Her latest comment, which was also reported by the Washington Post, about not knowing what wiping a server clean means, suggests “I did not know about it” would be a common excuse for national blunders and scandals if she ever got elected to the White House.

Her making a joke about SnapChat  automatically deleting emails, in reference to her mishandling top secret national documents and emails, was ridiculous and shameful. It would have been as if Bill Clinton was making a speech in reference to the Monica Lewinsky affair, which got him impeached and almost thrown out of office, and joked about the Ashley Madison sex site hacking scandal.

Wake up my Democrat friends. Your situation is no better than the Republicans’, whose candidates I will discuss in other postings.

All Roads Lead To 'Bridge To Nowhere'

You probably think I always say the current President Bush says ONLY dumb things or tells lies only. Not true. For once, he IS right (not just too Far Right). We DO need more (or at least better) roads. OK, STOP. That is as far as I can Yield to his point of view, which is too driven by extreme agendas, instead of middle-of-the-road policies. And, yes, enough with the bad traffic puns. Let's get back on course. (Sorry, can't resist!).

This latest highway bill will probably do some useful road building, some repairs, some new stuff, but does it matter how great a road is if it goes to Nowhere, or as in this case, to the $231 MILLION Dollar bridge to nowhere that will be built in Alaska?

What road are we on? As a nation. With Bush, it's "My Way Or The Highway" except, in this case, the highway our nation is on, is going his way, the wrong way --- and there's no two ways about it.

I know we do not have job security, or even security in the subway. Many of us have no medical insurance (health security) nor do we have financial security. Even he says social security is a mess and security around the world is even worse for us Americans.

So, the only hope we have is to make a brighter future for kids here. A road for smart, hardworking people to reach an environment in which high-tech, high-quality, high-paying jobs ensure our economic well being, and standards of living.

Bush says this bill will create jobs of the future.

THAT has me worried. Really worried.

We put man on the moon (forget Bush's now totally MIA plans to visit Mars). We built F16s, Stealth bombers, nuclear weapons, microprocessors, laser surgery, microsurgery, software, operating systems, artificial intelligence, speech recognition, telephones, the Internet and all the jobs Bush can promise are road building crew or bulldozer assembly plant jobs?

Should we allow our nation to stay on this road? To Nowhere?

I say, No. Let's take the next exit behind the Bush.