Concrete source: MIT scientists turn the concrete jungle green

By Ian Hardy BBC News, Cambridge, Massachusetts



WATCH: Concrete is ubiquitous, but most of us are unaware of its environmental impact

The word "concrete" is not much fun to say out loud. It actually sounds like a cold, hard, grey word.
Rainforest and rainbow Concrete jungle: For every ton of traditional concrete a ton of CO2 is produced also

The substance itself is even dull. Not even its assured place in the history books of the Roman Empire make it a less than sexy subject from the bystander's point of view.

Let's face it - concrete is boring. Most of us recognise it instantly, when we see hideous flats and offices from the 1960s and 1970s, that for a brief moment were the cutting edge of architecture.

So, with our expectations completely lowered, it's time to visit the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known better as MIT.



Concrete age

Here concrete is treated with an admiration more often reserved for diamonds or gold, especially by Franz-Josef Ulm, one of the top professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

"Concrete is maybe one of the oldest man-made materials on earth," he says.

"Some people say it was used by the Egyptians for the second layer of the pyramids. Modern cement came about in the late 19th, early 20th Century."

When you meet the researchers their passion for concrete becomes infectious. It has, after all, had an immeasurable impact on mankind.

It has allowed us to cross rivers easily, live on top of one another in relative comfort and drive vehicles for hundreds of miles without becoming stuck in the mud.

Hamlin Jennings, the executive director of MIT's Concrete Sustainability Hub, a collection of academics from various departments brought together to examine concrete in detail, says it is a fascinating substance.

Franz-Josef Ulm Professor Franz-Josef Ulm says the Egyptians may have used concrete in the construction of pyramids

"Concrete is a relatively inexpensive. It's a forgiving material - it can be mixed by ordinary labourers, and used in climates ranging from the South Pole to the tropical mid part of the Earth. It can also get hard under water."

Environmental impact

But all that comes at a price to the environment. Thirty billion tons of concrete are manufactured globally each year.

The way that concrete is mixed is very simple says Professor Ulm.

"It's made out of cement. Cement is basically limestone and clay. Cement is then mixed with water to form this ubiquitous material which shapes our landscapes and cities."

This process of combining of water, cement paste, sand and rock creates an awful lot of ozone-depleting CO2 gases - about five to 10% of the world's total emissions.
Professor Hamlin Jennings Professor Hamlin Jennings has been probing the secrets of concrete

MIT wanted to see whether this could be lowered. After all, it has a habit of making giant steps from the tiniest of changes - so tiny in this case, it was invisible to the human eye.

Despite its availability all over the world and its ease of use, the molecular structure of concrete had remained elusive for decades. In particular one part of it - calcium silicate hydrate - refused all attempts to be analysed under an electron microscope or by nano-indentation.

"Calcium silicate hydrate does not reveal its secrets easily." says Professor Hamlin Jennings.

"It's partly amorphous; it contains a lot of water, which evaporates, and the structure changes. So what you see in an electron microscope, which requires a vacuum, is substantially different from what is naturally there."

So the scientists turned to their laptops, and using cutting-edge computational mathematics, modelled the concrete on the screen at a molecular level.

In 2009, after three years of almost constant hard-drive rotation, all the atoms fell into place in a nice colourful stable pattern on the monitor.

That was just the easy bit.

For the next two years one MIT academic in particular, Roland Pellenq, played what amounted to a really tedious video game. He moved, removed, changed and added molecules to the traditional concrete model.


MIT's green concrete Re-inventing the wheel: MIT's green concrete is stronger and more durable than its dirtier ancestor

Then one day he made history. He re-invented concrete.

This version is stronger, more durable and greener. They call it green concrete, not to be confused with the scores of other products already available labelled green concrete, that have mostly been transformed by marketing rather than molecular experts.

"Almost every civil-engineering department in the world, almost without exception, has a group of people who work on [the development of] concrete in one form of another," says Professor Jennings.

"They have beavered away trying this and trying that and the formulations have changed over the last 50 years, but not radically."

Test subject
[IMG]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/52113000/jpg/_52113104_greenconcrete624.jpg[/IMG]
But don't look for green concrete at the local hardware shop quite yet.

Optimistically, the first structures to use the new technology are five years away from construction. MIT's job is done, but that job is only to provide a "proof of concept".

Roland Pellenq Roland Pellenq is the man who finally re-invented concrete

It's up to the worldwide building industry to take the new concrete and pour it through its paces.

The compound will be pulled, pushed, squeezed, frozen, flattened and smashed until it begs for mercy from government regulators and industry panels.

Only when it can prove itself in the real world will it be allowed to claim the title of "most used material anywhere in the world" from its very close cousin.

How our world could change is also not something that MIT really ponders too much.

Their inventive phase will undoubtedly lead to a compelling innovative phase far from the Cambridge-based campus. But it's not hard to imagine all the possibilities, good and bad.

Fewer potholes on the roads? Fewer road works and traffic jams? Huge real-estate savings by companies and governments? And what will happen to the number of construction workers?

Longer-lasting buildings mean fewer workers, but higher buildings and longer bridges made with the new tougher cement paste might mean more jobs.

Nothing, as they say, is written in stone - or concrete.

See the world in a new light

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/apr/21/retinal-prosthetics-human-plus-exhibition


Dr Patrick Degenaar explains how retinal prosthetics may one day allow humans to see in ultraviolet and infrared, a concept explored in a film unveiled at the Human+ exhibition in Dublin


Song of the Machine by Superflux speculates on the possibilities for augmented reality offered by the new technology Link to this video

The purpose of retinal prosthetics is to restore sight to patients who have a degenerative condition called retinitis pigmentosa, which affects one in 3,500 people. In the condition, the retina's light-sensing cells – rods and cones – become inactive and eventually die. Symptoms start with night blindness and worsening tunnel vision, but eventually there is a total loss of sight.

In 1992, research showed that the eye's communication cells – known as retinal ganglion cells – remain intact in patients with retinitis pigmentosa. The discovery opened up the prospect of restoring some form of visual function to these people by controlling the cells' communication patterns.

In the past two decades since the research was published, hundreds of millions of pounds have been invested in retinal prosthesis research. Unfortunately, in contrast to the development of cochlear implants – which restore hearing to the deaf – progress has been slow. The highest resolution prosthesis to date was created by the Retina Implant company based in Tübingen, Germany, whose 1,500-electrode implant has allowed one of their patients, Mika, to distinguish large white characters on a black background.

One of the key challenges has been the fundamental architecture of our visual system. The eye is not simply a camera, but the first stage in a system for understanding the world around us. There are around 50 different types of processing neuron in the retina, and more than 20 types of retinal ganglion cell. So the visual cortex of the brain expects to receive the visual world encoded in a "neural song" of many different voices. Precise coding to reproduce this song is hard to achieve with implanted electrodes and the result is that the patient sees phosphenes – flashing dots of light – rather than what we would normally define as sight.

Optogenetics, an exciting new gene therapy technique, has the potential to bypass many of these problems and last year was hailed as Method of the Year by the journal Nature. Invented by Ernst Bamberg and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt eight years ago, the technique uses gene therapy to sensitise nerve cells to particular colours of light. Intense pulses of this wavelength of light make the photosensitised nerve cells fire. (Neurologists call each firing of a nerve an "action potential" – the currency of information in the nervous system.)

So in optogenetic retinal prosthetics, rather than performing highly complex surgery to implant electrodes into a patient's retina, a solution of a special virus would simply be injected to introduce new genes into the nerve cells. The patient would then wear a headset that records and interprets the visual scene and sends coded pulses of light to the retina. As a single pulse of light can generate a single action potential, the information encoded from the visual scene can be much more in tune with the neural song expected by the visual cortex.

The OptoNeuro European project I lead at Newcastle University is researching this new approach, and we hope to start human trials towards the middle of this decade.

The first optogenetic retinal prostheses will not deliver perfect vision, so we have teamed up with the London-based design practice Superflux to explore how the user's interaction with this new technology can be made more practical and meaningful in the coming years. The key objective is to maximise the useful sight restored to the patient while also exploring the unique possibilities of this new, modified – even enhanced – form of vision.

In their concept video Song of the Machine (above), Anab Jain, Jon Ardern and Justin Pickard explore the personal and emotional complexities that might arise once this science leaves the lab and begins to touch our daily lives. The title is derived from the idea that in optogenetic retinal prosthetics the body is itself modified to interface with the machine in order to appreciate the neural song.

Even if resolution is low, the prosthesis could allow users to experience the visual world in wavelengths beyond those perceptible to normal-sighted humans. For example the eye absorbs ultraviolet light before it reaches the retina, and nature finds it difficult to make infrared light receptors. Such constraints do not affect modern camera technology.

This "multi-spectral imaging" could be used for purely pragmatic purposes, such as telling at a glance whether an object is too hot to touch. Alternatively, it could create a certain visual poetry by allowing us to experience a flower in all its ultraviolet glory – as seen by honey bees.

By exploring these possibilities in our research, it may be possible to improve the experience of the patients who will eventually wear these prostheses, allowing them to enjoy some of the benefits of the new field of augmented reality.

Dr Patrick Degenaar is an optogenetics researcher at Newcastle University where he leads the OptoNeuro project

23 April 2011 Last updated at 21:13 ET

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12661646

Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study
By Matt Danzico BBC News, New York


The happiest man in the world

In a laboratory tucked away off a noisy New York City street, a soft-spoken neuroscientist has been placing Tibetan Buddhist monks into a car-sized brain scanner to better understand the ancient practice of meditation.

But could this unusual research not only unravel the secrets of leading a harmonious life but also shed light on some of the world's more mysterious diseases?

Zoran Josipovic, a research scientist and adjunct professor at New York University, says he has been peering into the brains of monks while they meditate in an attempt to understand how their brains reorganise themselves during the exercise.

Since 2008, the researcher has been placing the minds and bodies of prominent Buddhist figures into a five-tonne (5,000kg) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

The scanner tracks blood flow within the monks' heads as they meditate inside its clunky walls, which echoes a musical rhythm when the machine is operating.

Dr Josipovic, who also moonlights as a Buddhist monk, says he is hoping to find how some meditators achieve a state of "nonduality" or "oneness" with the world, a unifying consciousness between a person and their environment.
Zoran Josipovic looking at brain scans on a computer The study specifically looks at the default network in the brain, which controls self-reflective thoughts

"One thing that meditation does for those who practise it a lot is that it cultivates attentional skills," Dr Josipovic says, adding that those harnessed skills can help lead to a more tranquil and happier way of being.

"Meditation research, particularly in the last 10 years or so, has shown to be very promising because it points to an ability of the brain to change and optimise in a way we didn't know previously was possible."

When one relaxes into a state of oneness, the neural networks in experienced practitioners change as they lower the psychological wall between themselves and their environments, Dr Josipovic says.

And this reorganisation in the brain may lead to what some meditators claim to be a deep harmony between themselves and their surroundings.
Shifting attention

Dr Josipovic's research is part of a larger effort better to understand what scientists have dubbed the default network in the brain.

He says the brain appears to be organised into two networks: the extrinsic network and the intrinsic, or default, network.
Zoran Josipovic prepares a Buddhist monk for a brain scan in an fMRI machine Dr Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators during the study

The extrinsic portion of the brain becomes active when individuals are focused on external tasks, like playing sports or pouring a cup of coffee.

The default network churns when people reflect on matters that involve themselves and their emotions.

But the networks are rarely fully active at the same time. And like a seesaw, when one rises, the other one dips down.

This neural set-up allows individuals to concentrate more easily on one task at any given time, without being consumed by distractions like daydreaming.

"What we're trying to do is basically track the changes in the networks in the brain as the person shifts between these modes of attention," Dr Josipovic says.

Dr Josipovic has found that some Buddhist monks and other experienced meditators have the ability to keep both neural networks active at the same time during meditation - that is to say, they have found a way to lift both sides of the seesaw simultaneously.

And Dr Josipovic believes this ability to churn both the internal and external networks in the brain concurrently may lead the monks to experience a harmonious feeling of oneness with their environment.

Self-reflection

Scientists previously believed the self-reflective, default network in the brain was simply one that was active when a person had no task on which to focus their attention.

But researchers have found in the past decade that this section of the brain swells with activity when the subject thinks about the self.

The default network came to light in 2001 when Dr Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in the US state of Missouri, began scanning the brains of individuals who were not given tasks to perform.

The patients quickly became bored, and Dr Raichle noticed a second network, that had previously gone unnoticed, danced with activity. But the researcher was unclear why this activity was occurring.

Other scientists were quick to suggest that Dr Raichle's subjects could have actually been thinking about themselves.

“ It's a major and understudied network in the brain that seems to be very involved in a lot of neurological disorders, including autism and Alzheimer's”

Cindy Lustig University of Michigan, associate professor of neuroscience

Soon other neuroscientists, who conducted studies using movies to stimulate the brain, found that when there was a lull of activity in a film, the default network began to flash - signalling that research subjects may have begun to think about themselves out of boredom.

But Dr Raichle says the default network is important for more than just thinking about what one had for dinner last night.

"Researchers have wrestled with this idea of how we know we are who we are. The default mode network says something about how that might have come to be," he says.

And Dr Raichle adds that those studying the default network may also help in uncovering the secrets surrounding some psychological disorders, like depression, autism and even Alzheimer's disease.

"If you look at Alzheimer's Disease, and you look at whether it attacks a particular part of the brain, what's amazing is that it actually attacks the default mode network," says Dr Raichle, adding that intrinsic network research, like Dr Josipovic's, could assist in explaining why that is.

Cindy Lustig, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, agrees.

"It's a major and understudied network in the brain that seems to be very involved in a lot of neurological disorders, including autism and Alzheimer's, and understanding how that network interacts with the task-oriented [extrinsic] network is important," she says. "It is sort of the other piece of the puzzle that's been ignored for too long."

Dr Josipovic has scanned the brains of more than 20 experienced meditators, both monks and nuns who primarily study the Tibetan Buddhist style of meditation, to better understand this mysterious network.

He says his research, which will soon be published, will for the moment continue to concentrate on explaining the neurological implications of oneness and tranquillity - though improving understanding of autism or Alzheimer's along the way would certainly be quite a bonus.

18 May 2011 Last updated at 20:53 ET


The Colombian Alzheimer's family testing possible cures

By Bill Law BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents



Alzheimer's patient Johnhaider, with his nephew and sister, Patricia Johnhaider, left, who has early onset Alzheimer's, and family


An extended family in Colombia struck by hereditary and very early onset Alzheimer's is taking part in a new drugs trial that doctors hope will lead to a cure for sufferers worldwide.

Johnhaider sits in a wheelchair, rubbing one leg compulsively. His eyes are empty. He can no longer talk. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know his sister Patricia.

Johnhaider is in the final stages of Alzheimer's disease - the most common form of dementia.

This is remarkable for two reasons. He is only 53, when most patients at the same stage of this terminal illness are in their mid-60s at least.

He is also a member of an extended Colombian family, half of whom will contract Alzheimer's at an early age, according to medical researchers who have been monitoring the occurrence of the disease in the clan.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
Dr Francisco Lopera

I saw we had three generations affected, and in each generation half of the children were affected - this was hereditary”

Dr Francisco Lopera University of Antioquia

There is now hope that research involving this family - who are described by one scientist as a "natural laboratory" - will help speed the discovery of a cure for this devastating condition.

The clan is currently about 5,000-strong and scattered across remote villages in the Andes mountains that surround the northerly city of Medellin - the second largest in Colombia. All are descendants of one couple of Basque origin, who settled here in the early 1700s.

The man responsible for uncovering this family's cruel medical history is Dr Francisco Lopera, a behavioural neurologist at Medellin's University of Antioquia.

Dr Lopera first stumbled on the phenomenon in the early 1980s.

"I saw a man of 47 with dementia that was very similar to Alzheimer's disease. That was curious because he was very young."

Then Dr Lopera learned that the man's father, grandfather and several brothers had also suffered from dementia.
Brain of a deceased Alzheimer's patient Scientists from around the world are working with the family to test theories about potential cures

"I saw we had three generations affected, and in each generation half of the children were affected. This was hereditary."

Dr Lopera and a small team from his university scoured the region, despite the risks from drug traffickers and rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc).

By the end of the 1980s, he had assembled a family tree stretching back nearly 300 years, big enough to cover the wall of an auditorium.

It took another decade to isolate the cause - a gene thought to trigger early onset of the disease.

If one parent has the gene, there is a 50% chance their child will have it too. Half the Colombian family members carry the gene, called the paisa mutation - "paisa" refers to the people of the region.

This rare mutation in an isolated population has attracted scientists from the Banner Institute in Phoenix, Arizona - a world leader in dementia research.
Continue reading the main story

What causes Alzheimer's?

No single factor has been identified, but it may be a combination of...
Age
Genetic inheritance
Environmental factors
Lifestyle and general health

Dr Adam Fleisher, a geriatric neurologist at the institute, says Alzheimer's is like "an approaching pandemic". With life expectancy increasing, and the number of dementia suffers growing exponentially, the disease has the potential to devastate public healthcare systems in developed countries, he says.

"The truth is it's going to affect you, and your ability to get healthcare, whether you get Alzheimer's or not. We need to find a cure."

The Banner Institute scientists will test drugs on the family which are designed to attack a neural plaque that builds up on the brains of all Alzheimer's sufferers. The sticky, chewing gum-like plaque is caused by a malfunction which causes the misproduction of a starch-like protein called amyloid.

The hope is that by using experimental drugs, growth of this amyloid plaque will be inhibited before the illness strikes.


" I want to participate - it's for me, it's for my family, it's for the rest of the world”

Patricia, Johnhaider sister

The Colombian family present researchers with the chance to work with healthy people before they develop dementia.

Using lumbar punctures, brain scans and other techniques, they will monitor and measure those on the drugs and those receiving a placebo.

The hope is that with funding in place, the trials can begin in late 2012.

If in the extended family the onset of Alzheimer's is delayed, or stopped, then the researchers will have hit the mother lode - a potential cure for sufferers worldwide. That remains a big if.

No-one yet knows if amyloid plaque is the cause or an effect of Alzheimer's. As Joseph Arboleda, a Harvard-based researcher working with Dr Lopera says, the trial puts this hypothesis to the test.

It is possible that drugs will inhibit the brain plaque and yet the family will still get dementia. Such results would prove devastating for current research.
Doctors recruiting volunteers for research Doctors recruit members of the family for research

"It would be a huge setback for everybody," says Arboleda. "The patients, the scientists - this is the best we've got. If it falls down everyone is in trouble."

For the family, though, the burden of care, the terrible knowledge that for half of them the disease is inevitable, and that the paisa mutation will be passed on to half of their children far outweighs the risk of trialling unproven drugs.

Johnhaider was in his mid-40s when the symptoms first struck, and by that time his mother had already died from the disease. She too had begun to exhibit symptoms in her mid-40s.

Johnhaider's sister, Patricia, does not know if she carries the gene. At 49, and with no signs yet, she is hopeful but worried, and that is why she is prepared to take part in the trial.

"I have no options," she says, gently adjusting a worn blanket that covers her brother's thin legs.

"I am a little bit worried," says Patricia. "But I want to participate: it's for me, it's for my family, and it's for the rest of the world."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13428265

The Mystery of Consciousness Continues
June 9, 2011
John R. Searle
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Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain
by Antonio Damasio
Pantheon, 367 pp., $28.95
1.

How do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness? I think this is the most important question in the biological sciences today. Two related questions: Where exactly is consciousness realized in the brain and how does it function causally in our behavior? Antonio Damasio is one of the leading workers in the field of consciousness research, and after having written a number of books on related problems, in Self Comes to Mind he addresses the problem of consciousness directly. He does not claim to have solved it but he believes that he has made advances and pointed in the right direction for a solution.
searle_1-060911.jpg

Musée d’Orsay, Paris/RMN–Grand Palais/Hervé Lewandowski

Odilon Redon: Closed Eyes, 1890; from the exhibition ‘Odilon Redon: The Prince of Dreams, 1840–1916,’ at the Grand Palais, Paris, March 23–June 20, 2011, and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, July 7–October 16, 2011

What exactly is consciousness? There are a number of senses of the word in ordinary speech, but there is one that is most important for philosophy and science: consciousness consists of qualitative, subjective states of feeling or sentience or awareness. These typically begin when we awake from a dreamless sleep and they go on until we fall asleep again or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness. Consciousness, in short, is a matter of the qualitative experiences that we have. To understand qualitativeness, think of the difference between drinking beer, listening to music, and thinking about your income tax. Each experience has a distinct quality.

Because of this qualitative character all conscious states are essentially subjective in the sense that they exist only as experienced by a subject—human or animal. The problem of consciousness can now be stated somewhat more precisely: How does the brain produce qualitative subjectivity? How does it get us over the hump from the objective third-person character of neuron firings to the subjective first-person feelings we have when we are conscious?

There is so much confusion surrounding the notions of objectivity and subjectivity that I need to say a word to clarify them. In one sense, the objective/subjective distinction is about claims to knowledge. I call this the epistemic sense. A claim is said to be objective if its truth or falsity can be settled as a matter of fact independently of anybody’s attitudes, feelings, or evaluations; it is subjective if it cannot. For example, the claim that Van Gogh died in France is epistemically objective. But the claim that Van Gogh was a better painter than Gauguin is, as they say, a matter of subjective opinion. It is epistemically subjective.
Bloomsbury / Spring Titles

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In another sense, the objective/subjective distinction is about modes of existence. I call this the ontological sense. An entity has an objective ontology if its existence does not depend on being experienced by a human or animal subject; otherwise it is subjective. For example, mountains, molecules, and tectonic plates are ontologically objective. Their existence does not depend on being experienced by anybody. But pains, tickles, and itches only exist when experienced by a human or animal subject. They are ontologically subjective.

I emphasize these two senses of the distinction because a common mistake is to suppose that because science is objective and consciousness is subjective, there cannot be a science of consciousness. Science is indeed epistemically objective, because scientific claims are supposed to be verifiable independently of anybody’s feelings and attitudes. But the ontological subjectivity of the domain of consciousness does not preclude an objective science of that domain. You can have an (epistemically) objective science of an (ontologically) subjective consciousness. Much confusion has been created by the failure to see this point.

So our question is: How does the brain create ontological subjectivity? We know consciousness happens and we know the brain does it. How does it work? How do we approach this problem scientifically? The standard way is to go through three steps. First, try to find the neurobiological correlate of consciousness. A lot of work has been done on this. There is now even a commonly used abbreviation, NCC, for the neuronal correlate of consciousness. Second, try to test if the correlations are in fact causal. Do the neurobiological states cause consciousness? Third, try to formulate a theory. Why do these processes cause consciousness at all, and why do these specific processes cause these specific conscious states? In recent years there has been a sizable number of important research efforts devoted to solving these problems, and I have reviewed several of the relevant books in these pages.1

One depressing feature of this entire research project is that it does not seem to be making much progress. Most efforts to identify the NCC have concentrated on the thalamocortical system, the area including the thalamus and the different layers of the cortex. But the slowness of progress makes one wonder if we are, perhaps, proceeding on the basis of wrong assumptions. Damasio’s book makes a new start in at least two respects. First, he emphasizes other areas of the brain in the production of consciousness, especially the brain stem. Other theorists ignore the brain stem, presumably because it is an evolutionarily primitive part of the brain. They think consciousness is the result of activity in more advanced neuroanatomical features, such as the thalamocortical system. Second, his entire book is built around the theme that the self plays a crucial role in the creation of consciousness.
2.

To summarize Damasio’s argument2 is not an easy task because the book is densely argued and to me at least often unclear. Here is the basic framework: the brain creates an (unconscious) mind. The brain also creates the self. When the self encounters the mind, consciousness results. As with most important theories there is an underlying intuition that drives his theory, though he does not say it explicitly: whenever I have a conscious experience I always experience it as mine. I do not just have a sequence of unrelated neutral qualitative states that could belong to anybody, but I have them as part of a coherent unity that is constitutive of and experienced as myself. So if consciousness is somehow always related to the self, then it seems natural to think that maybe the key to understanding the neurobiology of consciousness is by way of the neurobiology of the self.

The book addresses two problems: (1) How does the brain construct a mind? and (2) How does the brain make the mind conscious? The brain creates a mind by creating images, which are unconscious momentary patterns on sheets of neurons called maps. The images may be either of parts of the body or of things outside the body, but in general, perception is the result of mapping. Damasio says, “The distinctive feature of brains such as the one we own is their uncanny ability to create maps.” Brain maps are not static; they change from moment to moment. The mind is a consequence of the mapping activity of the brain. “Minds emerge,” Damasio writes, “when the activity of small [neuronal] circuits is organized across large networks so as to compose momentary patterns. The patterns represent things and events located outside the brain.” The term “map” applies to all of these patterns, and though they are mental, they are at this stage still totally unconscious, according to Damasio.

Body mapping is the key to the problem of consciousness, because by mapping the body the brain manages to create the critical component of the self. Having made a mind by making maps, the brain makes the mind conscious by creating a self, and when the self encounters the mind, consciousness results. This is the source of Damasio’s title, Self Comes to Mind:

The decisive step in the making of consciousness is not the making of images and creating the basics of the mind. The decisive step is making the images ours, making them belong to their rightful owners…. [Italics in original.]

Damasio’s two crucial notions are consciousness and the self.

(1) Consciousness. In actual practice I think his idea of consciousness is essentially the one stated above. Its essence is qualitative subjectivity. But when Damasio defines it explicitly it comes out a bit differently: it is “a state of mind in which there is knowledge of one’s own existence and of the existence of surroundings” (italics in original). I do not believe this definition is correct. My dog, Gilbert, is plainly conscious, but in what sense does he have knowledge of his own existence? He is certainly aware of his surroundings when he perceives anything. But it is hard to say that when he is dreaming he has knowledge of the existence of his surroundings. It is Damasio’s right to define a word any way he likes, but I think in practice he uses “consciousness,” as I do, to refer to ontologically subjective states such as pains, and does not use it just to describe epistemic states, such as my knowing that I am in Berkeley.

(2) The Self. The self is a much harder notion to define, and I do not find his definitions entirely clear. He says the self is decomposable into three components, the protoself, the core self, and the autobiographical self. Each of these can come in two forms, the “self-as-object” and the “self-as-knower.” But the self-as-object can also operate as knower.

The protoself is constituted by special kinds of mental images of the body produced in body-mapping structures, below the level of the cerebral cortex. The protoself is “an integrated collection of separate neural patterns that map, moment by moment, the most stable aspects of the organism’s physical structure” (italics in original). The first product of the protoself is “primordial feelings.” Whenever you are awake there has to be some form of feeling. The second form of the self, the “core self,” is about action. “The core self unfolds in a sequence of images that describe an object engaging the protoself and modifying that protoself, including its primordial feelings.” These images are now conscious because they have encountered the self. Finally there is the autobiographical self, constituted in large part by memories of facts and events about the self and about its social setting. The protoself and the core self constitute a “material me.” The autobiographical self constitutes a “social me.” Our sense of person and identity is in the autobiographical self.


When we put this all together we get the following result: conscious minds begin when the self comes to mind, when brains add a process involving a person’s sense of self to the mind mix. Specifically, the neurology of consciousness is organized around the brain structures involved in generating three features: wakefulness, mind, and self. Three major anatomical features are the brain stem, the thalamus, and the cerebral cortex. There is no direct alignment between, on the one hand, each of these anatomical features, and, on the other, each component of the mental trio of wakefulness, mind, and self. All three anatomical divisions contribute some aspect of wakefulness, mind, and self. To be fully conscious you have to have three features: (1) to be awake, (2) to have an operational mind, and (3) to have a sense of self as a protagonist of the experience.

Finally, after more than 250 pages, we get to the problem of qualia—a term often used for qualitative conscious states. Damasio tells us that there are two kinds of qualia: Qualia I and Qualia II. Qualia I is about pain and pleasure, but the problem of Qualia II is why there should be any feelings at all. He thinks Qualia I is not a mystery but that the Qualia II problem is more difficult. About Qualia II we get the following stunning passage:

Qualia is part of the contents that come to be known as the self process, the self construction illuminating the mind construction. But somewhat paradoxically, Qualia II is also the grounding for the proto-self and thus sits astride mind and self, in a hybrid transition. The neural design that enables qualia provides the brain with felt perceptions, a sense of pure experience. After a protagonist is added to the process, the experience is claimed by its newly minted owner, the self.

It is a bit hard to see how this is consistent with the rest of the book. The self is introduced to explain consciousness, but if it is to explain consciousness we cannot assume that the self is already conscious. How did it get to be conscious? Yet he tells us that qualia are the “grounding” of the self. But qualia just are conscious states. So this account, if we are to take this passage seriously, would be circular. We would be assuming consciousness to explain consciousness.

This is only a brief summary of the main argument of the book and I am leaving out Damasio’s rich and rewarding discussion of many other issues, such as the emotions, perception, memory, and mirror neurons.3
3.

I have a large number of criticisms to make of the book, but I will confine them to three topics: Damasio’s account of the self, his conception of the mind, and his theory of consciousness. I think all are open to question.

The Self. The project is to give an account of consciousness by showing how the interaction between the mind and the self produces it. In order to do that one would have to give an account of the mind and the self that did not already presuppose that either was conscious and then show how their interaction produces consciousness. One would have to explain the mind as a set of ontologically objective biological processes, then do a similar explanation of the self, and then specify the mechanisms by which the structures of the self interact with the mind structures in order to produce qualitative subjectivity.

As far as I can tell Damasio does not succeed in doing this; indeed he does not even really try. He does try to give an account of the mind as a set of (unconscious) mapping activities of the brain, and this does not presuppose, or at least it does not obviously presuppose, that these activities are conscious. But when he gets to the self, it is hard to understand any of his three divisions of the self, protoself, core self, and autobiographical self, without supposing that they are already conscious.

The problem can be stated succinctly by presenting his account with the following dilemma: Is the self, as he describes it, unconscious or conscious? If it is unconscious then he has nothing to say about how its encounter with a mind results in consciousness. But if you look at the text closely it seems pretty clear that there is no way to understand the sort of self that he describes without supposing that it is already conscious. He frequently uses words like “primordial feeling” and “emotion” to describe the self. It is hard to understand these in a way that does not imply consciousness. This account is therefore circular because we are assuming a conscious self in order to explain the conscious mind, but this uses consciousness to explain consciousness.

The Mind. My objection to Damasio’s account of the self is that he has tacitly, if unconsciously, smuggled consciousness into his conception of it without explaining how it got there. My objection to his account of mind is that he does not see how much consciousness is essential to our understanding of the mind.

He says the brain creates the mind by making maps. On the standard understanding of the causal relations between brain and mind, that is not true. The brain creates the mind by making thoughts, feelings, perceptions, pains, memories, sensations, and all the rest of it, both conscious and unconscious. The creation of neurobiological patterns is an essential part of this process, but he gives no reason to suppose that the map, qua map, has any psychological reality at all. When he tells us that the mind consists largely of unconscious maps, one has to ask: What fact about these maps makes them mental? When we read words like “image,” “perception,” and “feeling” in his account of maps, we tend naturally to connect them with the conscious formation of images and the experience of perceptions and feelings. But that is not what he means when he talks about the mapping activity of the brain. The problem, to put it in a nutshell, is that he has given us no reason to suppose that these maps have any mental or psychological reality at all.

Consider an obvious example of a map that we are all familiar with, the retinal image inside the eyeball when we see anything. As far as I can see, this map/image has no psychological reality whatever. We do not see it or otherwise experience it. The retinal image is a step from the introduction of optical stimuli to conscious perceptions. But most of these steps, as far as I know, have no psychological reality whatever. They are not the mind, or part of the mind. In any case he gives us no reason to suppose they have any mental reality at all. They are just “momentary patterns.” He tells us that they are “of” something and that they “represent” things and events outside the brain. But how do they represent? What fact makes them “of” anything?

At any given point in waking life there are two sorts of things going on in the brain, neurobiological processes and consciousness. Some of those neurobiological processes are unconscious mental states. What fact about them makes them mental? The question about how these processes become mental is not trivial. Damasio assumes that a pattern that occurs on the way to a mental state is already mental. There is no justification given for this assumption. He tells us that subjectivity is not required for mental states to exist. Yes, but what is required? What fact about them makes them mental?

Whenever we talk about mental states and events, conscious or unconscious, we have to be able to say what exactly the content of the state in question is. I see the tree in front of me, I think about the lunch I am going to have later, I feel a pain in my thigh. In each case, the mental reality, conscious or unconscious, has a specific content. The problem with Damasio’s notion of the mind is that he does not specify any actual or possible contents. Maybe there is a psychological reality to the maps, but he gives us no reason to suppose there is. A more natural way to describe at least many of the maps would be to say that they are stages on the way to the construction of mental states.

Consciousness. We have to keep reminding ourselves that any type of qualitative subjectivity is a form of consciousness. The possession of such states is necessary and sufficient for being conscious. Consciousness comes in degrees, and these range all the way from fanatic intensity to just barely being awake. But all of these are degrees within consciousness. There is no such thing as a “hybrid” form of consciousness. But the present task in the neurobiology of consciousness is to explain exactly how brain processes create consciousness.

I think the fact that Damasio finds dreams and states such as jet lag “exceptions” to his account is a clue that something is wrong. About jet lag he says: “there is a mind but not quite yet a mind organized with all the properties of consciousness.” He tells us that wakefulness is essential for consciousness. But in the ordinary sense it is not. I can have dreams when I am in REM sleep. He says this is a “partial exception” but there is nothing partial about it. It is a total exception.

He sees correctly that dreams and jet lag have to be distinguished from normal, healthy, goal-directed states of consciousness. But the question “What makes a state of consciousness healthy?” is quite different from “How does the brain create consciousness in the first place?” Our task is to explain consciousness, i.e., qualitative subjectivity. Damasio claims that wakefulness is a necessary condition for consciousness. But what these cases show is that it is not. His answer, that they are not normal, is quite correct but does not address the question: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the creation of qualitative subjectivity?
4.

Damasio and I agree that in addition to conscious mental states there are unconscious states. What fact about certain brain processes makes them mental? This is one aspect of the traditional “mind-body problem.” What is its solution? Without going into detail, the best way is to consider an example. Even when I am in a sound, dreamless sleep it is true to say of me that I believe/remember that George Washington was the first president. What fact about me makes it the case then and there that I have that unconscious mental state? I think the answer is that my brain is in a condition such that I can produce that state in a conscious form and in conscious behavior. I can, for example, give a correct answer to the question “Who was the first president?”

The notion of the unconscious is the notion of a capacity of the brain to produce states and actions in a conscious form. Sometimes these capacities are blocked by brain damage, repression, loss of memory, etc., but the basic idea of an unconscious mental state, I think, is clear enough. I believe that Damasio uses the notion of the unconscious rather uncritically, and he does not see the importance of distinguishing between those neurobiological processes that are genuinely unconscious mental states, such as my unconscious memory when I am sound asleep that Washington was the first president; and those that are totally nonconscious and nonmental, such as the secretions of the neurotransmitters when I move my body.

I am sympathetic with the basic intuition that drives Damasio’s investigation, namely that in any account of consciousness we need to explain how our conscious states are experienced, not just as a sequence of isolated qualitative subjective events, but as “my experiences.” This is part of what we need to explain. He proposes that we should take this characteristic of the self and treat it as the basis of consciousness. In the end that may be the right approach, but he does not give convincing reasons to suppose that it is. I believe a more plausible approach is to suppose that nonpathological forms of consciousness already come with a sense of the self. Our sense of self is a product of a certain sort of consciousness, not conversely. That is why we can lose that sense in certain pathological forms of consciousness. I have great admiration for this book and its author. I think it is an adventurous, courageous, and intelligent effort. I do not think he has made a convincing case that this is the right way to solve the problem of consciousness.

1

For my review of Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1995) and Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (Oxford University Press, 1994), see The New York Review , November 2, 1995 ; for my review of Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present (Basic Books, 1989) and Bright Air, Brilliant Fire (Basic Books, 1992), Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Back Bay/Little, Brown, 1991), and Israel Rosenfield, The Strange, Familiar and Forgotten (Vintage, 1993), see The New York Review , November 16, 1995 ; for my review of Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness (Roberts and Company, 2004), see The New York Review , January 13, 2005 . Several of these are collected in John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York Review Books, 1997). ?
2

I am grateful to Damasio for an e-mail exchange about the correct interpretation of his views. ?
3

When a primate engages in some physical activity and is watched by another, some of the neurons in the watcher match or mirror some of the neuronal behavior of the actor. These matching neurons are called mirror neurons. ?

2 June 2011 Last updated at 19:39 ET


New strain of MRSA superbug found in cows

Pallab Ghosh By Pallab Ghosh Science correspondent, BBC News

[IMG]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/50566000/jpg/_50566629_b234068-mrsa_resistant_staphylococcus_bacteria-spl.jpg[/IMG]
MRSA Dr Garcia-Alvarez said finding a new strain in both in humans and cows is 'very worrying'


Aromatherapy oils 'destroy' MRSA
Plan for routine MRSA screening
MRSA 'spread by moving patients'

A new strain of the MRSA "superbug" has been found in British cows and is believed to be infecting humans.

Environmental campaigners say the new strain has emerged because of the over-use of antibiotics by dairy farmers.

Dr Mark Holmes of Cambridge University, who led the research, said this was a "credible hypothesis".

The researchers, writing in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal, say there is no additional health risk from eating milk and dairy products.

'Financial pressure'

MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is a drug-resistant form of a usually harmless bacterium which can be deadly when it infects wounds.

The 35 or so strains of antibiotic-resistant superbugs are genetically fairly similar. However, this new variety is very different and it is thought that it might have first emerged from cows.

Its discoverers have dubbed it "New MRSA"

Antibiotics are widely used by dairy farmers to treat cows with mastitis. However over-use means some bacteria become resistant and difficult to treat if humans become infected.

Dr Holmes said the problem might be exacerbated by financial pressures on diary farmers.

"If you drive your cows harder to produce more milk you get more mastitis," he told reporters at a news conference.

The Soil Association has called for a complete ban on routine use of antibiotics in farming.

Soil Association director Helen Browning said: "Dairy systems are becoming ever more antibiotic-dependent. We need to get farmers off this treadmill, even if that means that milk has to cost a few pennies more".

“Start Quote

It does appear that the numbers are rising”

Dr Mark Holmes Cambridge University

National Farmers' Union chief dairy adviser Rob Newberry said the health and welfare of cows were of "paramount importance" to British dairy farmers.

"In the interests of human and animal health, and animal welfare, it is important that veterinary medicines are administered as little as possible but as much as necessary," he said.

"Any antibiotic or veterinary medicine being administered to a food producing animal has strict conditions of use, including milk and meat withdrawal times, and in general, under European law, would only be available under prescription."

Dr Holmes and his colleague Dr Laura Garcia-Alvarez discovered the new strain while studying a bacterium known to cause mastitis in cows.

They found that, like other MRSA strains, it was resistant to the most commonly used antibiotics. However, the bug was found to be genetically very different.

Subsequent research showed that the strain was also present in humans.

Dr Garcia-Alvarez says that finding a new strain in both in humans and cows is "very worrying".

"Workers on dairy farms are at higher risk of carrying MRSA but we don't yet know if this translates to a higher risk [of them becoming ill]," she said.

'Very low risk'

Dr Holmes said very few people had been infected with the new strain, probably fewer than 100 a year in the UK. "But it does appear that the numbers are rising," he says.

The Health Protection Agency said the risk of becoming infected with the new strain was "very low".

Dr Holmes and Dr Garcia-Alvarez will now investigate the prevalence of the new strain and whether it is more or less harmful than current strains.

They also plan to conduct studies on farms to look for more MRSA strains of this type and explore any potential risks to farm workers.

MRSA is often found in hospitals and was linked to 1,593 deaths in 2007.

Since then the number of suspected fatal cases has fallen dramatically. There were 1,290 in 2008 and 781 in 2009.

A Department of Health spokesman said: "From the available evidence, we understand this new form of MRSA is rare in the UK and is not causing infections in humans.

"However, our expert committee, ARHAI, will be reviewing this issue at their next meeting and will consider potential medical, veterinary and food safety issues."

A Food Standards Agency spokesman said the study did not provide direct evidence that humans were being infected with MRSA from cattle.

"The risk of contracting this new strain of MRSA through drinking milk is extremely low because the vast majority of cows' milk is pasteurised and the pasteurisation process destroys all types of MRSA," he added.

Should We be concerned I am.

20 June 2011 Last updated at 08:24 ET
[URL]http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13796479[/URL]

World's oceans in 'shocking' decline


[IMG]http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53455000/jpg/_53455161_dscn0002.jpg[/IMG]
Richard Black By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News
Coral and fish Coral reefs are subject to "multiple stressors" that could destroy many within a human generation


Acid oceans turn 'Nemo' fish deaf
Coral reefs heading into crisis
2010 sets new temperature records

The oceans are in a worse state than previously suspected, according to an expert panel of scientists.

In a new report, they warn that ocean life is "at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history".

They conclude that issues such as over-fishing, pollution and climate change are acting together in ways that have not previously been recognised.

The impacts, they say, are already affecting humanity.

The panel was convened by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), and brought together experts from different disciplines, including coral reef ecologists, toxicologists, and fisheries scientists.

Its report will be formally released later this week.

"The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, IPSO's scientific director and professor of conservation biology at Oxford University.

"As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

"We've sat in one forum and spoken to each other about what we're seeing, and we've ended up with a picture showing that almost right across the board we're seeing changes that are happening faster than we'd thought, or in ways that we didn't expect to see for hundreds of years."

These "accelerated" changes include melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, sea level rise, and release of methane trapped in the sea bed.
Fast changes

"The rate of change is vastly exceeding what we were expecting even a couple of years ago," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a coral specialist from the University of Queensland in Australia.
Fish at market Some species are already fished way beyond their limits - and may also be affected by other threats

"So if you look at almost everything, whether it's fisheries in temperate zones or coral reefs or Arctic sea ice, all of this is undergoing changes, but at a much faster rate than we had thought."

But more worrying than this, the team noted, are the ways in which different issues act synergistically to increase threats to marine life.

Some pollutants, for example, stick to the surfaces of tiny plastic particles that are now found in the ocean bed.

This increases the amounts of these pollutants that are consumed by bottom-feeding fish.

Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms - which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

In a wider sense, ocean acidification, warming, local pollution and overfishing are acting together to increase the threat to coral reefs - so much so that three-quarters of the world's reefs are at risk of severe decline.
Carbon deposits

“Start Quote

The challenges are vast; but unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen”

Dan Laffoley IUCN

Life on Earth has gone through five "mass extinction events" caused by events such as asteroid impacts; and it is often said that humanity's combined impact is causing a sixth such event.

The IPSO report concludes that it is too early to say definitively.

But the trends are such that it is likely to happen, they say - and far faster than any of the previous five.

"What we're seeing at the moment is unprecedented in the fossil record - the environmental changes are much more rapid," Professor Rogers told BBC News.

"We've still got most of the world's biodiversity, but the actual rate of extinction is much higher [than in past events] - and what we face is certainly a globally significant extinction event."

The report also notes that previous mass extinction events have been associated with trends being observed now - disturbances of the carbon cycle, and acidification and hypoxia (depletion of oxygen) of seawater.

Levels of CO2 being absorbed by the oceans are already far greater than during the great extinction of marine species 55 million years ago (during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum), it concludes.
Blue planet

The report's conclusions will be presented at UN headquarters in New York this week, when government delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.
Flowers between solar panels In the long run, greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to conserve ocean life, the report concludes

IPSO's immediate recommendations include:

stopping exploitative fishing now, with special emphasis on the high seas where currently there is little effective regulation
mapping and then reducing the input of pollutants including plastics, agricultural fertilisers and human waste
making sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon dioxide levels are now so high, it says, that ways of pulling the gas out of the atmosphere need to be researched urgently - but not using techniques, such as iron fertilisation, that lead to more CO2 entering the oceans.

"We have to bring down CO2 emissions to zero within about 20 years," Professor Hoegh-Guldberg told BBC News.

"If we don't do that, we're going to see steady acidification of the seas, heat events that are wiping out things like kelp forests and coral reefs, and we'll see a very different ocean."

Another of the report's authors, Dan Laffoley, marine chair of the World Commission on Protected Areas and an adviser to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), admitted the challenges were vast.

"But unlike previous generations, we know what now needs to happen," he said.

"The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now."