Consciousness: Explored and Explained
Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, one of the world’s leading sleep researchers, casts new light on the science of the mind, probing where and how consciousness is generated in the brain. Watch this spellbinding conversation between Kaufman, Tononi, and moderator Alan Alda as they explore and explain the art, science, and mystery of consciousness.
Recorded June 2010; Posted March 2011
Just found this while studying diligently for my non-Euclidean geometry final. I really want to see this/crochet a reef for my apartment now
Last week, I spent a few hours in a palliative care unit.
As medical students, we’re fixated on the living. What drug can cure that symptom. How surgery can remove the cancer. Where we can find a bed so that the patient with diabetes can have her complications managed.
Rationally, we know that…
1. If someone with a mental illness does something violent, the mental illness is assumed to be the cause of the violence.
2. If someone without mental illness does something violent, they are assumed to have a mental illness. [Perceived] Sanity is…
Consciousness: Explored and Explained
Consciousness is a terrible curse. Or so says a character in screenwriter/director Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich. Part theater of the absurd and part neuroscience fiction, the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s work captures the splintering between what we perceive and what we feel as our brains grapple with multiple layers of reality. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi, one of the world’s leading sleep researchers, casts new light on the science of the mind, probing where and how consciousness is generated in the brain. Watch this spellbinding conversation between Kaufman, Tononi, and moderator Alan Alda as they explore and explain the art, science, and mystery of consciousness.
Recorded June 2010; Posted March 2011
Four hemophiliac patients successfully treated with gene therapy
Hemophilia, a disease whose victims can suffer serious internal bleeding and may bleed to death from injuries, has a long and eventful history. Caused by defective blood clotting factors, the disease has been with us since at least the second century, when a rabbi gave mothers whose first two sons had bled to death from circumcision wounds permission to leave the third sons uncircumcised. It also famously afflicted several members of European royal families. But a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine brings us a bit closer to a new kind of historic event: a cure.
Following up on years of preclinical trials, including the curing of hemophiliac mice earlier this year, scientists gave six patients a gene therapy treatment, injecting them with a specially built virus carrying a functioning version of the gene for the defective clotting factor. The virus inserted the gene into liver cells, which proceeded to manufacture the clotting factor, and the patients maintained elevated levels of it for over 6 months. Four of the patients were able to stop receiving injections of clotting factor (the current treatment) altogether.
Preliminary results from an ongoing study of a malaria vaccine which is starting to show positive results! It appears to reduce severe malaria by about a third, which isn’t perfect but it’s an indicator of progress.
I’m sure that after this there will still be quite a wait before the vaccine sees commercial production (if they go forward with 33% protection), or they may hold out for a higher success rate.
I’m going to try to find the journal article as well.
Hemorrhagic Fever Clinical Presentations - US Military Video - Posted by PublicResourceOrg
Graphic Content Warning - Autopsies
From 23:10 on you can see the more fatal presentations and internal presentation of the hemorrhagic fever the Army was dealing with in Korea. Viruses were not yet known, but the disease they were trying to fight over there was a member of the Hantaviridae. Despite a focused 25-year search, the Hantaan virus itself was not isolated until 1978, by Ho-Wang Lee of Korea.
Hantavirus is spread by rodent vectors, can be contracted year-round, and the specific virus that was contracted by UN workers and US army personnel had a 5-10% mortality rate. It is not transmissible from human-to-human (except in rare exceptions, of an extremely rare strain) and can largely be controlled by controlling rodent populations.
