What If You Stopped Eating?

What happens to your body without food? Be a part of the Global Citizen movement! http://glblctzn.me/1SCUFwm SHARE on Twitter: http://bit.ly/1KQ658Z and Facebook

Short video and podcast about the famous Phineas Gage

Check out this YouTube video then go listen to the podcast below a special programme on the extraordinary case of Phineas Gage, a 19th century railway worker who survived a bizarre accident that changed him and the study of neuroscience forever.



BBC Word Sevice PodCast Claudia Hammond visits Harvard Medical School Museum in Boston to see for herself what remains of the man with the hole in his head. At the Oliver Zangwill Centre for Neuropsychological Rehabilitation in Ely, Cambridgeshire she meets clients with brain injuries similar to those suffered by Phineas Gage and discovers how far we've come in understanding and treatment since Gage suffered his appalling trauma. More Phineas Gage Information

The Human Brain versus the Matrix

The Human Brain versus the Matrix

By Athena Andreadis/ Source: h+ Magazine

When surveying the goals of transhumanists, I found it striking how heavily many of them favor conventional engineering. This seems inefficient and inelegant, since such engineering reproduces slowly, clumsily and imperfectly, what biological systems have fine-tuned for eons, from nanobots (enzymes and miRNAs) to virtual reality (lucid dreaming).

Recently, I was reading an article about memory chips. In it, the primary researcher makes two statements that fall in the "not even wrong" category: "Brain cells are nothing but leaky bags of salt solution," and "I don't need a grand theory of the mind to fix what is essentially a signal-processing problem."

And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

Read the full story here...