Edmonton Aging Symposium Recordings
Edmonton Aging Symposium - Presentation Archive - a number of presenations from the Edmonton Aging Symposium, covering both the biomedicine and politics of ageing.
April 25, 2007
April 23, 2007
Wiser than Nature?
The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom, forthcoming in Enhancing Humans, eds. Julian Savulescu and Nick Bostrom (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
When looking for human enhancements, can we outwit the wisdom of nature? This paper explores when evolution doesn't do a good job from a human perspective, and we actually can do better.
One way is when the tradeoffs have changed. Today we have far more food than in the past but also a need for concentrated attention under longer periods. In the past any brain that needed extra nutrients or person uninterested in eating a lot would have been weeded out by evolution as soon as lean times arrived. Similarly, our hunter-gatherer ancestors had more use for peripheral attention to detect prey or predators than focusing for hours on a book. So these changed tradeoffs mean we are not adapted to our current world, and enhancements that change us to become more adapted might work well.
Evolution doesn't "value" what humans value. The things we desire - happiness, knowledge, art, longevity etc - are not valued in natural selection (except as tools for increasing fitness). So many enhancement of things that promote human well-being may simply have been "overlooked" by evolution.
Evolution cannot do everything. There are limits to what can evolve, either due to inherent biological limits, how genetics work, that it would require tricky genetic jumps or just take long time. We will not evolve away the appendix because small appendices easier gets appendicitis and people carrying alleles for them will be weeded out; some genetic illnesses might give us advantages if we have just one copy of the affected allele but produce serious illness with two. Hence we can actually foresee how to do things better than nature in this case.
By learning to recognize when nature isn't wise, we can figure out when we can do better.
The Ecstasy of Love
Ecstasy really does unleash the love hormone - health - 04 April 2007 - New Scientist
The drug MDMA ("ecstasy") has a reputation for making people sensual and loving. New experimens on rats show that it makes the brain release oxytocin, a neurohormone that is known to be important in maternal and pair bonding.
The image is borrowed from Mouse Party, an educational flash animation showing some of the neuroscience of drugs. It might not give a correct image of neuropharmacological research (smoking is banned in most labs) but it is amusing.
March 23, 2007
Three (Non)Colorblind Mice
This paper demonstrates that mice, normally not very good at color discrimination (they are similar to human with red-green color blindness), became better at it when a human gene for a photopigment was added. This is interesting because the gene only affected the eye: the brain developed the necessary processing for enhanced color vision as a response to the eye providing it. This suggests that in principle it should be possible to genetically insert new photopigment into human eyes, and if done early enough we would learn to make use of the information.
March 22, 2007
Scanning the Future
Delta Scan: The Future of Science and Technology, 2005-2055 has an outlook on Artificial Extensions of Human Capabilities. Other outlooks of interest for enhancement are Computing on the Human Platform, Engineering the Computer-Brain Interface and Growing Market for 'Lifestyle' Drugs.
Then there is the documents belonging to Sigma Scan that discuss The Extended Self: better than well and Technology for the Body and Mind
An outlook is a "consistent, plausible view of the future based on the best expertise available. It is not a prediction." They are intented to take into account current trends and look at possible long-term potential, to give a context useful for planning and policy.
March 20, 2007
Pillbox vs. PC
Is the Key to Creativity in Your Pillbox, or in Your PC? - New York Times talks about cognitive enhancement using either pharmaceuticals or networked computing. There is no reason people might choose just one way, rather it is likely people will combine the different kinds as they develop. Drugs affect processes common to all tasks, software improves particular tasks.
"Caffeine is now a gateway drug that leads to a universe of ingestible mental enhancers"
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
March 14, 2007
Erasing Memories
A new paper, Doyère, V., et al. (2007). Synapse-specific reconsolidation of distinct fear memories in the lateral amygdala. Nature Neurosci. doi:10.1038/nn187 demonstrates how memories can be selectively erased.
Memory consolidation is the classic observation that as memories become older they become more fixed and harder to change. This occurs both by moving the information from working memory into long-term storage (facilitated by sleeping) and by chemical changes in the synaptic connections. However, the phenomen of reconsolidation shows that when a memory is activated again, there is a window where the synapses become easily changeable again. This can allow selective memory erasure.
Doyère et al. demonstrated that in rats, learning to associate a sound with an electric shock could be affected by infusing a drug that prevents consolidation. Rats were given the drug or saline solution in the brain area where the association was stored, and half were exposed to the sound again. A day after, the rats who were treated with the drug hardly reacted at all unlike the rats who got saline or did not hear the sound again.
Would this work in humans? Humans are fairly similar to rats, at least when it comes to learned fears. We may think much more about our fears, but deep down it seems that the same links between the same brain areas remain. Especially in PTSD it seems that humans can develop an overly strong fear reaction to a stimulus, so strong that it becomes self-reinforcing and impairs the ability to live an ordinary life. Clearly this research would be useful in unlearning this condition and possibly phobias.
Would it work on removing the episodic memories of what has happened, or on knowledge? Most research is done on the simple fear conditioning systems of rats because it is a simple, well studied experiment where the outcomes are clear. It is much harder to get rats to tell about their holiday memories than freezing up when they expect an electric shock. Still, there doesn't seem to be any neuroscientific reason why not reconsolidation could not be used elsewhere in the brain. The main problem seems to be to activate just the memory we wish to weaken: thinking of something else might cause unwanted disruption. This would probably mean that it would be hard to delete the memories of a quarrel or the concept of a heat engine, but fairly doable to delete memories that could be triggered directly by reviewing movies or seeing people, objects or places. Forgetting is hard work, and normally involves as much reappraisal of what happened as actual forgetting.