Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is one of the most devastating human pathologies. AD is the leading cause of age-related dementia and currently afflicts more than 44 million persons worldwide (World Alzheimer Report 2014). It is characterized by a cognitive decline and memory loss and by the appearance of two pathological hallmarks: beta amyloid plaques and cytoskeletal […]
The study of the spontaneous activity in the brain –and its origin– is one of the major puzzles in modern neural science. In many situations, the same neurons which behave smoothly and in an easily predictable way in in vitro experimental conditions, turn into unpredictable units, firing spikes irregularly and even chaotically, when they are […]
Some weeks ago in Naukas.com I wrote (in Spanish) about the wonderful latest video released by the team responsible for the Inner Life of a Cell which deals with the intricacies of cell trafficking in the inside of a neuron. Today I want to discuss an article recently published in the journal Science and that […]
In this last article of the series about free will, I am going to defend what we can call ‘the regret hypotheses’, which basically asserts that the feeling of regret is the basic, and best, explanation of why we think we are free, in the sense (as we saw in the first article of the […]
Nowadays there are still people that believe in destiny. However the scientific community more and more is bringing light to that subject showing that although the genetic material could program ourselves to suffer some pathologies, the day-to-day experiences are the ones that lead us towards a healthy or pathological aging. And how is that? Our […]
Psychologists and neurologists have been interested in the problem of free will since the beginning of their specialities, though the first clearly devised and relevant experiments on the topic were those of Libet and colleagues, in the early eighties. In this famous experiment, subjects who were before a clock, and whose brain electrical waves were […]
One of the most classical problems in philosophy is the existence and nature of free will. Though the growth of our scientific knowledge about the brain, and about the universe in general, is making the notion of ‘free will’ less and less tenable, it seems that the major difficulty becomes to reconcile this idea with […]
How are we like we are? What defines our mind, our character, and our behaviour? Men made themselves these questions in all ages of humanity. From the age of myths to the age of science the answers have been very many. We do not have an adequate answer yet, maybe never. However, the rise of […]
For several decades now, physicists, mathematicians, neurobiologists and other specialists have been joining efforts to build realistic mathematical models of neurons. A typical model consists on one or several differential equations that are able to predict the evolution of the membrane potential of a neuron for a given input. When introduced in a computer, these […]
The term reinforcement learning is well known among researchers in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence. It refers to a type of algorithms which are designed to solve a task by maximizing some kind of reward. In a simplified way, we could say that a typical reinforcement learning algorithm works as follows: our […]