Friday, February 25, 2011

A Brilliant Mind

Well, it's been about a week, time for my newest article. Per request of some of my readers, this article will be about the human brain, personality, and everything you should know about that noggin of yours.

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.” -William Shakespeare

The Human brain is by far one of the most astounding, repulsive, and mysterious of all the things to emerge from nature. It's hard to imagine amino acids would later result in the occurrence of such an incredible machine. Three times the average mammal's brain with an equivalent body size, using about thirty percent of your oxygen. If the brain is deprived of oxygen even ten seconds, you become unconscious, in four, brain damage occurs.

Brain damage changes everything about a person, taste, speech, hearing, personality, and everything that makes you who you are. Ninety billion neurons firing from synapses at near or at the speed of light (about 186,282 a second). In other words, information and commands are sent and processed very quickly.

The modern human brain over the past 28,000 years is shrinking, as found out by the Cro Magnom theory. This can be a bad thing because recent experiments show that a larger brain, helps prevent Alzheimer's disease. In adults, the average brain weight in men is about 11-12% more than the average brain weight in women. Men's heads are also about 2% bigger than women's. This is due to the larger physical stature of men. Male’s larger muscle mass, and larger body size require more neurons to control them.

Your brain is the control center of all your bodily functions. It continuously receives sensory information, such as sight, feel, taste, sound, and rapidly analyzes these data and then responds. The brain stem controls your breathing, heart rate, and other processes. The Neocortex is the center of "higher-order" thinking, learning, and memory, allowing us to have creativity, remember faces and names. The cerebellum is responsible for the body's hand-eye coordination, balance, and posture, allowing us to walk, sit, and play sports like football.


Recent study done by Professor of Biological Sciences Douglas McMahon, graduate student Chris Ciarleglio, post-doctoral fellow Karen Gamble and two undergraduate students at Vanderbilt University, have concluded that the season of your birth has vast effects on your personality and your body's internal clock. A huge step in explaining why we have the traits that we do and disorders some develop. If we are ever to get out of low earth orbit, we have to learn more about birth and how it affects the newborn. In the future births might have a simulated indoor season, chosen by the parent to help eliminate unwanted disorders.



Scientist have discovered that what you think about other people, also has a large impact on your persona. It has even been determined that "beautiful" people, convey first impressions better. Personality even effects individual fertility. There have been large studies on controlling these functions.

Tibetan monks have been controlling their body temperature, heart rate, and pain intake for hundreds of years. Further study has resulted in treatment for patients who have brain damage. Some conditions like constant pain from a car accident or oxygen deprivation.

Our brain is responsible for placebos working, people dying before they hit the ground from a fall, and whether you achieve the goal you set out to do. Generally if you think it's going to happen both consciously and unconsciously, the brain has a tendency to make the fear or desire real. Just remember that this question might start with scientist but it ends with you and whether you as an individual are willing to improve your personality.

If scientists solve many of the questions that we have with personalities & the brain, we will be able to replicate or even improve our brain. Making A.I. more intelligent than us, then downloading biologically, everything they know into our brains, selectively or not. Making robots that are sentient, sapient, and capable of creativity, reasoning, & solving problems. This could potentially, cure Alzheimer's, dementia, or other diseases and disorders. Replacing or adding synapses, nerve endings, and neurons in patients who suffer from Down syndrome, cancer, dyslexia, and many other modern plagues. It could even improve the way brain surgery is operated.

In the past one hundred years we have learned a lot about the mind, but the more we learned the more we found out how little we knew. The human brain will continue to astonish and baffle scientist for many years to come. Just don't be afraid to do things yourself, to improve your situation.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Extending our time here

Hi everyone, I will be writing about one article a week, so it might seem like it takes forever to get a new one.  This week’s article is about extending your life span, living healthy, and the future of this endeavor.

Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope. -Robert Ingersoll
 
If you love life and everyone in yours, it is only natural to want to stay here with them. There is a reason why we all cry at funerals. It is a horrible thing to lose someone that you love, that you fought with and made memories. It is like a part of you has died. When one person dies, everything they knew, all their memories and everything they might have done goes with them. Imagine if FDR wouldn't have died, if JFK died and they brought one of his clones online. Where would we be? In this week’s article I will be talking about what you can expect to see within your life time and what is on the horizon. We are literally on the brink of adding years on to our life. There are many scientists looking for the proverbial fountain of youth. Not bull crap, but actual science such as diets and chemicals we need and so on. This is all excluding political and religious arguments. Of course these will hold us back, but not all the countries will allow this to keep them out of the market. If you feel that it is an arrogant and vain endeavor you could of course not use any of the fruit of their labor. It isn't like anyone would be making you use any of it. Some people just feel like to die is human, that's okay but I disagree.

The first thing you need to do is exercise, eat right, and sleep well. Adults need about 6 hours of sleep. If you don't like veggie food then take vitamins. If you take vitamins, ones with omega 3 & lithium if you can find any. As for diets just look at what you’re eating, odds are, the nutritional facts are on the back or online. Calories are not evil contrary to popular belief. We use them as a source of energy, the majority of which are burned off as a source of heat. For males about 2000 daily is healthy, for woman about 1800 calories. For exercising you really do not have to do that much. Jog 15 minutes a day or walk 1 hour, then do sets of 10 Abe work outs and your fine. Walking and running are about the same, if you have health problems I recommend you walk. The average human life span right now in America for a male is 75, female 80. If you eat like you’re supposed to and exercise normally then you might live as long as 100.

Scientist like Aubrey De Gray (pictured right), look at death as a disease, another problem to be solved by man. The first step in this endeavor is to eliminate cell death. Currently we have done this with jellyfish. We do this by precision drugs or gene therapy for a more permanent telomere extension. Then we would have to solve the problem of trauma or if the body is completely destroyed cloning. A telomere is at the end of every cell, every time it divides it gets shorter and shorter. Telomeres are a lot like anklets on the end of your shoe lace. I would expect the first human experiments on humans to extend telomeres would be sometime between 2020 & 2030. They would experiment on humans after extensive study with animals and such. Cancer in humans is actually immortal, the result of damage DNA gone rampant and reproducing. We hope to imitate its cellular immortality. Solving cellular immortality also reverses the aging process.



After the problem of cell death and cancer are solved we move on to death by blunt force trauma. We will not completely solve this problem for a long time off but, we can help the healing process from such events. Nanites, very tiny robots, they work within our body, repairing us, & aiding our white blood cells. They would be self-sufficient relying on readily available resources within the body to reproduce themselves. You get a cut they rush in start repairing and helping the blood dry there, making sure no blood clots get lose and shoot to the brain. We have been working on less ambitious forms of this and have working ones now. Making one that works to this extent will take some time. The current ones were designed to drop off precision drugs on cancer. They work a lot like miniature b-52 bombers.


On a future note, expect people to be backing up their minds and all their memories within quantum super computers, so that they truly become immortal. If a person's body is destroyed beyond recognition a clone of their body is made and everything they knew and what made them downloaded into that clone. At first political leaders, and people defined as invaluable would have this as an advanced insurance option, then as the process became more and more common place the middle class might get their hands on it. When people are conceived they might even start changing them from inside the womb using Nanites. Removing health problems, changing eye and hair color, or whatever the parent wanted. We have a bright future so long as were there to see it one of our nations will accomplish this goal. I can only hope that sooner or later the United States is one of them.