A “techno-optimist” response to William Deresiewicz’s article  ’The End of Solitude’ -http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708 Just as television, with all its negative propaganda and harmful influences, can offer educational programming and a mental respite for the weary intellect, so digital technology, with its propensity for self-isolation can offer deeper connections to loved ones, and fast relief in emergency situations. Although, I agree that loneliness is indeed furthered by the continual “stream of mediated contact”, and television has no doubt perpetuated the capacity for boredom, I...

New research published  in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It’s the kind of thing seen in Hollywood’s “Matrix” franchise. Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person’s visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve...

Welcome to the world of body hacking! Hosted by James Poulos they discuss transhumanism and life optimization techniques as well as chat with a group experimenting with metal cyborg implants. Originally aired on March 5, 2013 Hosted by: James Poulos Guests: Dr. Natasha Vita-More (Scottsdale, AZ) Professor, University of Advancing Technology Tim Cannon (Philadelphia, PA) Founder of Grindhouse Olivia Webb (Philadelphia, PA) Biological Consultant Dr. Maxwell Mehlman (Cleveland , OH) Professor of Law & Medicine at Case University Looking for more? Check out this playlist below....

Mar. 5, 2013 — It is possible to tell who a person is thinking about by analyzing images of his or her brain. Our mental models of people produce unique patterns of brain activation, which can be detected using advanced imaging techniques according to a study by Cornell University neuroscientist Nathan Spreng and his colleagues. “When we looked at our data, we were shocked that we could successfully decode who our participants were thinking about based on their brain activity,” said Spreng, assistant professor of human development in Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. Understanding and predicting the behavior of others is...