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The walk sign lights up, and youre ready to step off the curb when you hear the blare of an ambulance sirenor the sound of kids screaming, or even some leaves rustling in the wind. How do you make a sensible decision about whether its safe to cross the street when your brain must instantaneously juggle conflicting and related sensory information? Those decisions are made in the prefrontal cortex. One of the last areas of the brain to mature, its responsible for moment-to-moment reactions. And although researchers have long studied how brain cells process mixed signals, the mechanism has largely remained a mystery. Finally, new research is providing some insight. Christopher Langdon and Tatiana Engel, neuroscientists at Princeton University, have come up with a mathematical framework to better explain the decision-making process. In a paper published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers lay out their techniquethe latent circuit modelto understand how a large network of brain activity works, down to individual cells behavior within it. Back to that crosswalk example. We want to understand how the prefrontal cortex is maintaining current goals while filtering out whats relevant and irrelevant,” Langdon tells Fast Company. The goal of his and Engel’s research, then, was to understand how the prefrontal cortex filters the irrelevant stimuli, like the rustling leaves, while keeping top of mind whats relevant, namely, crossing the street. (Another classic example of people trying to filter through conflicting information is the Stroop Color and Word Test, in which participants must discern the name of a color when its written in a different color of ink.) What the pair concluded is that the brains decision-making process, when theres conflicting stimuli, isnt driven by some novel or emergent solution in high-dimensional networks, but rather by classical mechanisms hidden inside of these networks, Langdon says. Its as though a few nerve cell ringleaders are calling the shots and influencing decision-making. But can this information help us improve our own decision-making? Not necessarily. The prefrontal cortex is constantly juggling current goals while attempting to suppress other tendenciessay, scrolling the news when you should be working. With a good prefrontal cortex thats working well, you can suppress that tendency,” Langdon says. Relevancy for machine learning The Princeton researchers showed that big neural networks can be reduced by filtering out irrelevant information, so that we can better understand how smaller networks work. According to Langdon, this has broader implications, including for the development of large language models used in machine learning. Large language models may have an enormous number of parameters that are expensive to train and require a lot of energy to use, Langdon explains, so theres a lot of focus on making them smaller by reducing the number of parameters in a way that will still yield the most salient results. In spirit, Langdon says, thats what we were doing here, but with a different model of neuroscience.
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When Dr. David Rabin told me how Apollo Sessions worked, my exact first thought was, poppycock. This was an app, he said, that would turn my iPhone into a healing device using the vibrations of the phones haptic engine. By stimulating the vagus nervea core component of the parasympathetic nervous system responsible for the bodys recovery and relaxation mechanismsusing certain frequencies, this iOS app would make me feel different. It works, he assured me. With trauma patients in clinical settings, he claimed. As someone who is skeptical about wundermedicine by default, I didnt believe it. But as someone who has lived through a few years of a traumatic experience, I was curious. I wanted to try it. And Im glad I did.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]The science behind ApolloFor 20 years, Rabin has studied chronic stress, focusing on the effects of addiction and trauma on veterans, women, and children. Witnessing the limitations of medication in treating these conditions, he and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center began exploring non-drug treatments. They discovered that various techniques, such as soothing touch, music, and talk therapy could induce a state of safety learning in the body, promoting recovery and reducing stress. This exploration led them to experiment with vibrations as a means to trigger the bodys natural relaxation response. Just like music can calm your body or getting a hug can calm your body, we can send soothing vibrations that are like music composed for your touch receptor system in your body to trigger the safety nervous system, Rabin explains.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]These vibrations, akin to the calming rhythm of ocean waves or a cats purr, activate the vagus nerve. This is a key player in regulating the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary bodily functions such as heart rate, digestion, and respiration. By activating the vagus nerve, Apollos vibrations promote a shift towards the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, responsible for rest and recovery. This shift counteracts the effects of chronic stress, which often keeps the body in a state of heightened arousal, leading to fatigue, anxiety, and difficulty concentrating. And since the vagus nerve can affect your state in different directions, if you manipulate the frequency of the vibration, you will trigger different physical responses.The teams initial research focused on using this technology to help veterans cope with trauma. However, they soon realized the potential benefits for everyday stress and began testing it on themselves and others in real-world situations. The results were so remarkable that they caught them by surprise: improved sleep, better focus, increased energy, and reduced reliance on stimulants like coffee. Recognizing the transformative potential of this discovery, Rabin and his colleagues decided to keep testing and eventually founded Apollo Neuroscience, a company that packaged what they learned into Apollo Neuro, a consumer wearable that used a haptic engine and software to help anyone destress (it was a finalist in our World Changing Ideas Award 2021).According to Rabin, Apollo Neuros effectiveness is backed by rigorous scientific research. He claims that they have completed eight clinical double-blind, randomized placebo-controlled crossover trials, with more than 1,700 subjects. Three of them are published and five are currently accepted for publication or under peer review for publication in 2025, he says. The company also claims it has 13 more ongoing clinical trials at different hospitals. One of the reviewed studies he shared with me, published in the Journal of Rheumatology, demonstrates that the Apollo wearable device led to significant improvements in fatigue, reduced instances of Raynaud phenomenon (a condition affecting blood flow to extremities), and enhanced overall quality of life, including physical function, mood, sleep, and social participation. The study, which involved participants wearing the device for a minimum of 15 minutes daily for four weeks, showed that the technology was well-tolerated and used far beyond the requested time, with no adverse effects. The iPhone versionBuilding on the success of the wearable device, the company has now launched Apollo Sessions, an iPhone app that delivers a subset of the same therapeutic vibrations without the need for the wearable. The idea of using the always-stressful iPhone vibration for good may seem nuts, but according to Rabin, Apollo Sessions takes the very device that often makes us feel overwhelmed and transforms it into a tool for calm and clarity.Rabinwho is also executive director at The Board of Medicinetells me that the companys mission is to create technology that heals humanity. We designed the wearable to prove that that was possible, he says, and it does [but] not everybody can afford a wearable. Thats when they looked at the haptic engines in phones to see if it was possible to do the same. It worked for the iPhone, he says, but not for Android phones, because they dont have the same level of access to the haptic capabilities of the hardware. While the Apollo Neuro devicewhich is worn on the wrist or anklehas more advanced features thanks to a more powerful haptic engine with a wider range of vibration intensities and patterns, the Apollo Sessions app offers only a subset of these functions. The iPhone Apollo Sessions app makes the core vibration technology accessible to everyone, Rabin says. The wearable has all these advanced AI and sleep benefits the phone does not have. The app focuses on providing daytime relaxation and stress relief, too.[Image: Apollo Neuroscience]Apollo Sessions offers a range of vibration patterns. These Vibesas the company calls temare designed to ease you into different states. Whether you need a boost of energy with Espresso Shot, a calming embrace with Hug, or a moment of relaxation with Relax, Rabin says Apollo Sessions can do that for you. He recommended that I start with the Hug Vibewhich is free to tryby placing the phone on your chest for two to five minutes, preferably in airplane mode with do not disturb enabled, to fully immerse in the experience for that limited time. He also said that I could put it on my yoga mat while I meditate or on the mattress while I go to sleep.Does it actually work?I tried it a few times. And, despite my natural skepticism, it does work. Perhaps it was self-suggestion. Maybe its a placebo effect. But it did what it says it does, especially the calming vibes. So well, in fact, that I asked my own therapist and he explained to me all the science behind this and other similar therapies associated with vibration and rhythm. The Apollo Sessions app is free. You can try the Hug one for two minutes, which should be enough to feel an effect. Or you can subscribe for $9.99 per month to go deeper, unlocking unlimited access to sessions that offer six different Vibes. Rabin says that the plan is to keep expanding this library as their research finds out the effect of other frequencies and vibration patterns.
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In another move from the Trump administration aimed at disrupting climate science, the Commerce Department has ordered NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to search grants for climate-change-related terms, signaling that it may work to cancel that funding. Its a move that could threaten a wide array of projectsincluding infrastructure work on bridges and roadsand leaves researchers uncertain about the future of their work. NOAA is one of the worlds leading climate science agencies, and it funds work on everything from atmospheric studies to wildfires to fishery recovery. NOAA also has funding available through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for habitat restoration, coastal resilience, and weather forecasting. The Trump administrations directive to search grants for climate terms includes words like climate, climate science, carbon, environmental quality, and pollution. This follows the move from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to search NOAA databases for DEI content. But terms like diversity could come up in discussions about ecological or biodiversity, researchers sayand climate terms are ubiquitous in everything the agency works on. Youre going to have a hard time finding grant awards that dont mention climate change, simply because of its role in all of these areas of science, says Douglas Price, whose work has focused on grant funding and climate research. It speaks to the blunt-force approach that’s being taken across the government right now. Infrastructure projects are tied to climate science By singling out climate-related terminology, all types of NOAA-funded work could be under threat. That includes infrastructure projects that have to take climate impacts into considerationbasically, anything you build, Price says. Anything that uses concrete, steel, asphalt, you have to be looking at extreme heat and extreme precipitation events. If youre going to exclude climate change from the planning and engineering of any sorts of projects, youre making them vulnerable to climate extremes that were seeing with regularity now. Whether in a tiny, coastal New England town or a major city like New York, infrastructure like roads, bridges, rail lines, and tunnels must consider climate threats. What are the new temperature extremes that we’re going to see? What is the new baseline for 100-year storms? What are the flooding extremes were going to see and how do we size storm sewers? Price says. Infrastructure projects are meant to last decades, so we cant build new bridges, for example, only for the climate extremes were currently experiencing; we have to think about the projected extremes well see in 50 years. Already, our current infrastructure is at risk. One environmental nonprofit worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears that his organization could be targeted by the administration, is concerned about this directive affecting existing agreements. His nonprofit uses funding that comes from other organizations via NOAA grants. One recent project involves designing and building two bridges to replace undersized culverts. When culverts are too small, the water flowing through them is stronger, which enhances erosion, blocks fish from passing through, and risks washing out structures. These culverts increase the risk of road failure and are barriers to spawning migration for salmon species, the worker says. These projects all explicitly mention climate change and habitat diversity. These phrases are in there because NOAA guidance is to design road crossings to account for anticipated changes due to climate change. Overall, ignoring climate impacts doesn’t stop them from happeningit just stops us from being prepared. By banning certain terms, Price says, You’re blindfolding yourself and walking into a strange room, and you know that there are lots of sharp objects in that room you can stumble into, but youve chosen to not look for them. A matter of life and death for at-risk communities Other NOAA-funded work is more on the nose when it comes to climate change, like mitigation efforts or environmental justice projectsboth specifically on Trumps radar for cuts. This isnt work being done in some lab that has implications for far into the future. Its being applied almost immediately to problems that we face, Price says. Grants help connect research institutions with vulnerable communities and the government agencies that can provide them resources. That could mean communicating flood risks to coastal communities or ensuring that the recovery efforts for the Los Angeles wildfires arent leaving less-wealthy communities behind. Or take an impact like extreme heat, which poses special risk for communities with lots of elderly residents or people with disabilities. If we cant understand those risks and where the vulnerabilities are, and if we cant help policymakers come up with ways of getting support to those communities, more people will die when we have extreme heat events than would otherwise, he says. This holds true for any extreme weather event. The main reason we want to understand climate change and that we want to increase resilience to impacts is because those impacts often are life-and-death matters to people, Price adds. These things arent abstract. They arent a game. Were honestly very concerned about peoples lives in the work that we do. A cloud of uncertainty for researchers A larger issue with targeting specific terms like climate or diversity is that it removes them from crucial context. You can’t talk about statistics without talking about bias; you cant talk about IT security without talking about privilege; you can’t talk about any population of humans, animals, or bacteria without talking about population diversity, Price says. Sifting through the results requires a certain understanding of these topics, one that the nonprofit worker doubts young DOGE workers have. The administrations approach isnt necessarily meant to be productive or exact. Instead, Price notes, its a way of creating a political climate where these topics feel threatened, and if you’re involved with these things, you’re at risk. With agency-level communication largely shut down and ever-changing orders, its difficult to know how this will all proceedwhether grants will actually be cut short, whether the courts will step in, whether researchers need to think about working with Congress. Theres a large cloud of uncertainty around how all of this is being done, he says. That means many researchers and their institutions are still looking for the best pathway to defend their work. But for climate researchers, antagonism isnt totally new. Climate scientists are quite used to being attacked poltically, Price says. Its just that now the attacks are focused on a particular vulnerability in science in general, which is the way that it is funded by the federal government.
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