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Stress Literally Shrinks Your Brain (7 Ways To Reverse This Effect)

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We all know that living under stressful conditions has serious emotional, even physical, consequences. So why do we have so much trouble taking action to reduce our stress levels and improve our lives?

Researchers at Yale University finally have the answer. They found that stress reduces the volume of grey matter in the areas of the brain responsible for self-control.

So experiencing stress actually makes it more difficult to deal with future stress because it diminishes your ability to take control of the situation, manage your stress and keep things from getting out of control.

A vicious cycle if there ever was one.

But don't be disheartened. It's not impossible to reduce your stress levels; you just need to make managing stress a higher priority if you want to reverse this effect. The sooner you start managing your stress effectively, the easier it will be to keep unexpected stress from causing damage in the future.

"The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another." -William James

Luckily, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold, change, and rebuild damaged areas as you practice new behaviors. So implementing healthy stress-relieving techniques can train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects from stress in the future.

Here are seven strategies to help you fix your brain and keep your stress under control:

1. Say No

Saying no is indeed a major challenge for many people. "No" is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it's time to say no, avoid phrases such as "I don't think I can" or "I'm not certain." Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.

2. Disconnect

Technology enables constant communication and the expectation that you should be available 24/7. It is extremely difficult to enjoy a stress-free moment outside of work when an email that will change your train of thought and get you thinking (read: stressing) about work can drop onto your phone at any moment.

Taking regular time off the grid helps you to keep your stress under control and to live in the moment. When you make yourself available to your work 24/7, you expose yourself to a constant barrage of stressors. Forcing yourself offline and even--gulp!--turning off your phone gives your body and mind a break. Studies have shown that something as simple as a weekend e-mail break can lower stress levels.

If detaching yourself from work-related communication on weekday evenings is too big a challenge, then how about the weekend? Choose blocks of time where you will cut the cord and go offline. You'll be amazed by how refreshing these breaks are and how they reduce stress by putting a mental recharge into your weekly schedule.

If you are worried about the negative repercussions of taking this step, try first doing it at times you are unlikely to be contacted--maybe Sunday morning. As you grow more comfortable with this, and as your coworkers begin to accept the time you spend offline, gradually expand the amount of time you spend away from technology.

3. Neutralize Toxic People

Dealing with difficult people is frustrating, exhausting, and highly stressful for most. You can control your interactions with toxic people by keeping your feelings in check. When you need to confront a toxic person, approach the situation rationally. Identify your own emotions and don't allow anger or frustration to fuel the chaos. Also, consider the difficult person's standpoint and perspective so that you can find solutions and common ground. Even when things completely derail, you can take the toxic person with a grain of salt to avoid letting him or her bring you down.

4. Don't Hold Grudges

The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event sends your body into fight-or-flight mode, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. When the threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when the threat is ancient history, holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding onto stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding onto a grudge means you're holding onto stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Letting go of a grudge not only makes you feel better now but can also improve your health.

5. Practice Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a simple, research-supported form of meditation that is an effective way to gain control of unruly thoughts and behaviors. People who practice mindfulness regularly are more focused, even when they are not meditating. It is an excellent technique to help reduce stress because it allows you to reduce the feeling of being out of control. Essentially, mindfulness helps you stop jumping from one thought to the next, which keeps you from ruminating on negative thoughts. Practicing mindfulness might even increase your score on an emotional intelligence test. Overall, it's a great way to make it through your busy day in a calm and productive manner.

6. Put Things In Perspective

Our worries often come from our own skewed perception of events. So before you spend too much time dwelling on what your boss said during the last staff meeting, take a minute to put the situation in perspective. If you aren't sure when you need to do this, try looking for clues that your anxiety may not be proportional to the stressor. If you are thinking in broad sweeping statements like "Everything is going wrong" or "Nothing will work out" then you need to reframe the situation. A great way to correct this unproductive thought pattern is to list the specific things that actually are going wrong or not working out. Most likely you will come up with just one or two things--not everything. The key to keeping your cool is to remember that your feelings are exaggerating the situation and the scope of the stressor is much more limited than it might appear.

7. Use Your Support System

It's tempting, yet entirely ineffective, to attempt tackling everything by yourself. To be calm and productive you need to recognize your weaknesses and ask for help when you need it. This means tapping into your support system when a situation is challenging enough for you to feel overwhelmed.

Everyone has someone at work and/or outside work who is on their team, rooting for them, and ready to help them get the best from a difficult situation. Identify these individuals in your life and make an effort to seek their insights and assistance when you need it. Something as simple as talking about your worries will provide an outlet for your anxiety and stress and supply you with a new perspective on the situation. Most of the time, other people can see a solution that you can't because they are not as emotionally invested in the situation. Asking for help will mitigate your anxiety and strengthen your relationships with those you rely upon.

Bringing It All Together

As simple as these strategies may seem, they are difficult to implement when your mind is clouded with stress. Force yourself to attempt them the next time your head is spinning, and you'll reap the benefits that come with disciplined stress management.

How do you manage stress? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.

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Many Commonly Used Drugs Are Useless
Some medications are life saving. I am so thankful for the trusty med that tames my atrial fibrillation.

Many meds are helpful -- demonstrating superiority to placebo in ways that are clearly clinically significant and life enhancing.

But many (perhaps most) drugs are probably no more than very expensive placebos. Patients get prescriptions from doctors when their symptoms are most severe and improve with time and positive expectation, not because the med is really effective.

Doctors and patients need independent, objective information on drug efficacy and risks.

The multibillion dollar pharma marketing machine can turn even the most useless and harmful drugs into financial blockbusters. Doctors and patients need independent, objective information on drug efficacy and risks.

This is the first of a series of blogs aimed at setting the record straight. Dick Bijl is President of the International Society Of Drug Bulletins (ISDB), a wonderful organization representing 53 national drug bulletins, each charged with presenting the best available data on the pluses and minuses of different medications. Drug bulletins are a source of truth to help patients and doctors see through the fudged misinformation generated by ubiquitous Pharma propaganda.

Dick writes: "Let's use the treatment of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) as a typical example of why and how medication use has become so excessive."

Elderly men often experience problems urinating -- weak or intermittent urinary stream, straining, hesitancy, terminal dribbling, incomplete emptying, urgency, frequency, incontinence, nocturia and/or post-micturition dribbling. These symptoms, so common in aging, provide a lucrative target market for pharma.

In the past, benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) was regarded as the most important cause of urinary symptoms. Nowadays, evidence confirming a link between LUTS and prostatic enlargement is regarded as weak. This hasn't prevented approval of many drugs for the treatment of BPH by the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

The bar for approval is set very low. Drug companies have only to show that their medication has a statistically significant advantage when compared to placebo. The FDA and EMA don't require that the med achieve what is ever so much more important- clinically relevant improvement as evidenced by patients actually also feeling and doing better when taking the drug. Small statistical blips are all it takes to get a drug approved.

There is a huge difference between statistical significance and clinical relevance. For example, the International Prostatic Symptoms Score is often used to quantify the treatment effects of urinary drugs. The IPSS scale goes from 0-35 with higher scores indicating more severe symptoms. A difference of ≥3 points = some effect; ≥5 points = moderate effect; ≥8 pt. = clear effect). In practice, it turns out that patients can't detect improvements if they are less than three points.

The results of clinical trials have shown that most drugs used to treat BPH are statistically more efficacious than placebo, but have no real clinical relevance. Because their improvement was less than three points, patients will not detect any difference between these drugs and placebo.

The same lack of clinical relevance holds for drug combinations. A combination of an alpha blocker and a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor or an alpha blocker and an antimuscarinic drug often results in statistically significant decreases in symptoms compared to placebo or to the individual drugs given alone. But here also, the differences were of such small magnitude that patients will not detect them.

Only in a small minority of clinical trials was the decrease in symptom score more than 3 points.
The lack of efficacy of BPS meds supports a policy of watchful waiting instead of starting drug therapy. The natural course of LUTS is quite favorable and in the majority of patients the severity of the symptoms will not increase.

Most (or all) of the relief patients feel taking the med is probably due to natural improvement or placebo effect, not to the med itself -- but they don't know this and will often misattribute benefit to the drug.

And almost all the drug studies have been performed in secondary and tertiary care. The results of these studies can't simply be generalized to primary care because it is not plausible that these patients have the same characteristics and therefore the same prognosis.

It's not rational to prescribe drugs that do not improve functioning more than placebo. Use of medication for LUTS should be discouraged since it is no better than placebo, but adds the risk of side effects. Counseling and re-assurance should be considered first.

Informed patients will be much less willing to take a drug that carries the risk of side effects, while offering at best only a very slight improvement in symptoms.

Whenever it is decided to start drug therapy, the best choice are alpha blockers. Side effects should be taken into account: fatigue, decreased vision, severe postoperative ophthalmological side effects or complications, orthostatic hypotension leading to headache and dizziness.
5-alpha reductase inhibitors should not be regarded as an alternative because of their small efficacy and side effects like gynecomastia, erection and ejaculation disorders, decreased libido, impotence, and breast cancer.

The antimuscarinics do not have a positive balance of efficacy and they have anticholinergic side effects (e.g., dry mouth, abdominal pain and constipation). Phosphodiesterase inhibitors have been introduced in recent years but studied insufficiently in comparative studied to give them a place. Combination-therapy should not be given because it does not have an added value related to clinical relevance but does add side effects.

We conclude that the natural course of LUTS in men is generally favorable; the pathophysiology of LUTS is not clear; the relation between prostatic volume and urinary complaints is weak; the mechanisms of action of meds is uncertain; and positive effects are small in placebo-controlled studies.

Therefore, primarily counseling and non-drug treatment are indicated and drug-treatment should be discouraged. In case a drug is needed only an alpha blocker is indicated, but this often just a very expensive placebo-therapy."

Thanks Dick for this illuminating analysis. Before considering any med useful, we should subtract placebo effect from reported efficacy- and also consider the considerable risk of med side effects and Pharma's ridiculously high prices.

In a rational world, people would be taking many fewer drugs, for much clearer indications, with benefits always balanced by consideration of risks, and with prices reflecting real value.

Medication use is now much more governed by pharma's commercial interest than by what is best for the patient.

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USA's First Olympic Gold Of The Summer, In Math
Did you know that the USA already won its first Olympic gold medal this summer? It was awarded a month ago in Hong Kong, rather than Rio. A team of six U.S. high school students won first place at the 57th annual International Mathematical Olympiad, their second consecutive win after a 21-year hiatus. This win not only brought home the top prize, but each team member captured a gold medal, two with perfect scores.

If this seems far afield from your own mathematical prowess, think of the Rio Olympics as a parallel. Every event contains stunning athleticism far beyond the ability of the average American. Still, a child imagines a goal on the playground basketball court as the winning shot for team USA. As the Olympics games are broadcast this summer, we can all live out our own Olympic-inspired dreams at community pools, volleyball courts and tracks around the country.

While we may not become Olympians during our weekly workouts, our physical training leads to stronger and healthier bodies. So too, does mathematical problem-solving for the mind. At Expii.com, a site with puzzles and problems for many levels of math training - from beginner to advanced, there is a gym, of sorts, to train for mathematics with a world-class coach. Hear it in his own words:

'After becoming the lead coach of the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team, I started Expii as a way of raising the bar in math and science education,' said Po-Shen Loh. 'Instead of focusing my efforts on a handful of students, I wanted to make it possible for anyone, anywhere to become a math genius.'

Dubious about improving your math skills through general training? Interestingly, our U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team switched their training focus from solving mathematics competition problems to helping the team members maximize their mathematical abilities and problem-solving skills. This change in training led to back-to-back wins at the IMO and the gold medals.

While we may not all compete in the International Mathematical Olympiad, our training in math has important consequences. Our country is facing a tremendous opportunity to meet the forecasted demand for 1 million STEM-related jobs. The U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad Team was selected through a series of competitions organized by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the world's largest community of mathematicians, students, and enthusiasts.

Like Expii.com and math educators, the Mathematical Association of America is dedicated to building our nation's next generation of problem solvers.

'For 350,000 American students each year, the MAA's American Mathematics Competitions is their opportunity to train like an Olympian, developing skills that reach far beyond these rigorous mathematics competitions,' said Michael Pearson, MAA Executive Director, 'I look forward to continuing to develop mathematical talent in our country with U.S. team members and coach, Po-Shen Loh and to witness the passion within these students for mathematical problem-solving,'

Let's jump right into training the mind with two Olympic-related math problems posed in this week's Expii problem sets.

Problem 1: (Level 2 difficulty) Risky Routine

As written in The New Yorker, Women's Gymnastics is a sport often contested in hundredths of a point, but Simone Biles is so dominant that she wins by whole numbers. The complex scoring system is based on a Difficulty Score (predetermined by the planned routine), and an Execution Score (out of a perfect 10.0, quantifying mistakes). There is a risk/reward tradeoff, as increasingly difficult routines bring higher chances of failure. Biles's dominance comes from her ability to significantly push up her Difficulty Score while still executing the routines with extreme reliability.

To get a feel for the game theory involved, suppose that you are a gymnast planning a routine where you need to perform 8 elements. For each of these 8 elements you can attempt at a C level (for 0.3 points) or an E level (for 0.5 points) level of difficulty. Your difficulty score is the sum of these 8 numbers, and you can mix and match between C's and E's. You are 100% confident of being able to execute every element at the C level, but for each element you attempt at the E level, you risk a 50% chance of a 0.5 point deduction in your Execution score.

You know that your opponents are extremely talented. What number of elements should you attempt at the E level in order to maximize your chance of achieving a Difficulty + Execution score of at least 13?

Ready for another?

Problem 2 (Difficulty 3) Strength in Numbers

Suppose that Country A has 400 million people, Country B has 100 million people, and each country always sends its strongest person to the Olympics for weightlifting. The strength of each person is an independent Normal random variable with a common mean and variance, which is the same across both countries. What is the probability that country A wins, rounded to the nearest whole percent?

Want more help? Visit the Expii site's posting of these and other Olympic themed problems.

Get ready for inspiring Olympic performances. If it inspires you to get off the coach and exercise, remember that you can also stay on the couch and train your mind in math. Do both and you'll be a healthier you!

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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A Chat with Information Scientist Pedro Marijuán

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PEDRO CLEMENTE MARIJUÁN

While there is still no scientific consensus on what "life" is -- although that does not deter attempts to make life in the lab -- there is a growing conversation among scientists about life's "information" component. However, scientists also find it difficult articulating just what information is. So I phoned information scientist Pedro Clemente Marijuán in Spain to explore the subject. Marijuán's current research interests include "the nature of intelligence and the nature of information, at the molecular-cellular and organismic (brain) levels."

Pedro Marijuán is Senior Research Scientist at Spain's Aragon Institute of Health Sciences (IACS) where he heads the Bioinformation Group. He has also served as IACS Research Director (2011-2015).

In 1991, Marijuán co-founded FIS (Foundations of Information Science) with theoretical biologist Michael Conrad. Marijuán says one of the missions of FIS is "organizing a sound body of new thinking about the informational cohesion of the physical, biological and social realms" of science. He is also Vice-President for Protocol of the International Society for Information Studies (IS4SI).

Pedro Marijuán's professional career began as an industrial engineer in the 1970s in Spain, working with computers in "enterprise organization," after receiving his undergraduate degree in engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Later inspired by John von Neumann's ideas, Marijuán began his own investigations into cognitive neuroscience, which led to his PhD (University of Barcelona, 1989): "On Natural Intelligence: The Evolution of Biological Information Processing." In the early 1990s he was a Visiting Research Associate at the University of Chicago, working with microbiologist James Shapiro, as well as at the University of Canberra.

Marijuán has taught engineering at the University of Zaragoza and is former SAMCA Chair at the Engineering School, University of Zaragoza.

Through the years Pedro Marijuán has organized and co-organized international conferences on information science in Madrid, Vienna, Paris, Beijing, Gothenberg (upcoming, 2017) and elsewhere, and a regular series of seminars in Spain on biomedicine and neuroscience.

He is author of the book, The Dual Brain and numerous other scientific publications, editor of "Cajal and Consciousness" (Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences) and of special issues on FIS published in the journals BioSystems and Symmetry: Culture and Science as well as of "Selected Papers from 'FIS 2010 Beijing.'"

One of Pedro Marijuán's other principal interests is understanding the sound of laughter, its structure, and using that information as a diagnostic tool in biomedicine. Our interview follows.

Suzan Mazur: In between your careers as an industrial engineer and cognitive neuroscientist, you were a visiting research associate at the University of Chicago in the early 1990s, working with microbiologist James Shapiro. That's quite a range of expertise. What sort of research were you doing with Jim Shapiro in Chicago?

Pedro Marijuán: I was advancing an informational scheme of the prokaryotic cell in relation to James Shapiro's interest in developing new evolutionary ideas. At the same time I was learning real biology from James -- I personally thank him for his hospitality and patience. However, I realized I needed stronger insights into the molecular machinery of the cell and into enzymes and proteins, so I began collaborating with biophysicist and theoretical biologist Michael Conrad as well as with enzymologist John Westley.

Both were relatively close to James Shapiro's interests. Michael Conrad was especially influential; Michael pioneered molecular computing and adaptability in ecological information processes. He looked beyond science in his work to philosophy, art, and literature.

Suzan Mazur: Please tell me a little about your current research interests.

Pedro Marijuán: Here at the Aragon Institute of Health Sciences (IACS) in Zaragoza, I'm investigating cellular signaling systems, social bonding, and human laughter. I and my small bioinformation group -- Jorge Navarro and Raquel del Moral -- are interested in studying everything alive that communicates: cells, organisms, people, and the way human society is structured through social bonds, i.e., language -- talking face-to-face, by phone, texting, etc. Because it's through language that human society evolved, grew complex and interesting.

People do need to talk to one another. If we don't speak, we don't feel well. Isolation is the worst scenario for human beings. Language, which was at first instrumental in humans, eventually became a necessity.

How much do people need to talk? And to whom? I'm interested in how people and communities build and maintain societal bonds through conversation and what the consequences are when that natural communication process goes awry.

To thrive, humans need to immerse themselves in social layers: An intimate layer ("family"), close friends, work relationships as well as general acquaintances. These bonds form a person's "sociotype." We have not only a genotype and phenotype, but also a "sociotype."

Suzan Mazur: Is this layering a perspective from your background in engineering?

Pedro Marijuán: Perhaps. I was an industrial engineer here in Spain during the 1970s, working with computers, in the field of "enterprise organization." I got terribly excited about the possibility of similar information processes in the human brain and in society. Then I read John von Neumann's book comparing the human brain to a computer. I began to realize the informational scheme of the single cell was missing in the scientific literature. I began doing informal research and wrote some newspaper articles, which eventually led to my PhD ["On Natural Intelligence: The Evolution of Biological Information Processing"].

Suzan Mazur: IACS, where you're currently Senior Research Scientist -- this is an organization focused on biomedical research?

Pedro Marijuán: IACS and its germane organization IIS Aragon cover all areas of biomedical research for the main hospitals in the Aragon region. Until the political change last year, I was Director of Research in charge of organizing teams, and focused on the many problems biomedical research has. I was reassigned as IACS Senior Research Scientist.

Suzan Mazur: Information science research.

Pedro Marijuán: Actually our group looks to find ways to apply information science to biomedicine. For example, we use information science as a diagnostic tool to study changes in the sound of laughter of depressed individuals. We've used it with EEG records, and to look for objective markers in fibromyalgia. We've also designed a questionnaire to gauge the sensitivity of the individual state of the sociotype. It's particularly helpful for the elderly because they suffer a lot from loneliness.

Suzan Mazur: You first wrote on the informational patterns of laughter 10 or so years ago. What was the thrust of that paper?

Pedro Marijuán: I highlighted the social role of laughter and peculiarities of the structure of the sounds of laughter. We've written four or five scientific papers on laughter since then. Laughter is a very, very strategic way of communicating. It connects the physiological, psychological, cognitive, emotional and social. Laughter tells a lot about a person and their environment. It's highly personal.

Why is someone laughing? Laughter may be particularly beautiful -- or out of context. Why is that? What are the main sound components we instinctively scan when we laugh? What is the emotional code attached to laughter?

Suzan Mazur: It's interesting that comedy in America used to be spontaneous, quite funny, a healthy release of tension. We had comedy from the Borscht Belt, Sid Caesar, Steve Allen, early Woody Allen, 1970s Saturday Night Live. Michael O'Donoghue -- the comedic genius behind SNL -- was a friend of mine. By the late 70s, Michael thought SNL was no longer funny. Roughly around the time he left the show. That's not a joke, by the way. Comedy now in America, at least, seems uninspired, a captive of its commercial sponsors.

Pedro Marijuán: Yes. I agree with you. I don't follow media much, but it's clear that individuals are now overloaded with new kinds of artificial information flows. When a person is systematically suffering information overloads, humor is a kind of canary in the mine, a barometer. Entering the mine, the canary dies or not. Humor, or lack of it, is an indicator of individual mental health and happiness, of a person's relationship to their social contacts and of societal health.

We are seeing a rise in the number of depressed patients. We see an amazing increase in the number of people living alone. We are witnessing the accelerated loss of what Robert Putnam calls "social capital."

The information revolution is contributing to these problems -- introducing surrogate bonds via new technologies that capture a growing portion of a person's time. People are alone, going from screen to screen, abandoning long-term rewards of face-to-face conversation, endangering their social bonds. Our very social nature is being denied, or mystified, and our sociotype is becoming dramatically flattened.

Suzan Mazur: I've interviewed Jaron Lanier, the "father of virtual reality" who has said regarding the digital world that humans may have taken a wrong turn for the right reasons and he predicts artificial intelligence ideology will reach a breaking point in Europe, but "the US will break first certainly, as we'll find out." His thinking is that human job displacement due to computerization and robotics will lead to a welfare state that can't be sustained.

Pedro Marijuán: Something similar happened with the first industrial revolution, with the second industrial revolution, and now we are suffering the consequences of the information and computer revolution. We have not developed the tools to successfully integrate all these artificial information flows with our natural information flows. The adaptability of our social nature, of our sociotype, has been pushed to the extremes.

In my info science parlance, the artificial flows of information that are reshaping the structures of our societies at tremendous speed are blind to the natural info flows to which our modest individual lives are upended. "No one to talk with? Do not worry, here's a pet robot that will fill your nostalgic needs of social bonding."

The power structure does not care about impoverishing people throughout the world through tremendous economic disruption and loss of intermediation structures; it pushes for even more disruption, impervious to the social crisis.

It is urgent that we provide a new vision for human society because this disruption and endangerment of our natural information flow touches us deep, into our cells. Science has been particularly influential in creating these strange new problems -- and in leaving them unchecked! Science must now help find the conceptual tools to address this social unease all around us.

Suzan Mazur: Would you talk a little bit about your role as chair of the Foundations of Information Science and would you define what you mean by the term "information"?

Pedro Marijuán: I co-founded the Foundations of Information Science with Michael Conrad more than 20 years ago -- we coined the name FIS in 1992. Michael Conrad was a very great man, enormously enthusiastic and engaging. Among Michael's many contributions to science, he was one of the first to attempt an evolutionary model of the "vertical information flow" in brain behavior. He passed away in 2000. Michael brought most of the specific scientific content to FIS, while the multidisciplinary vision of FIS was largely mine.

Suzan Mazur: What do you mean by the term "information"? I once interviewed physicist Sara Walker on the subject. She's a collaborator of Paul Davies at Arizona State University. Walker defined information as "events that affect and direct the states of a dynamic system." How do you define it?

Pedro Marijuán: The term is really undefinable because it's a relative term concerning the interaction between two entities -- the object and the subject. My favorite definition is "distinction on the adjacent." You cannot have an informational relationship with anything that does not "touch" you in some way. In order to make any distinction, something has to be "adjacent" to you.

This is biologically meaningful. I've based my informational scheme of the cell on this thinking of "distinction on the adjacent" -- where molecular recognition is the essential phenomenon over which biological complexity has been developed.

Myriad distinctions are factually created in the different adjacency relationships between biomolecules within the living cell, organized in informational architectures. There are dedicated informational detectors in the cellular membrane and the cell is open to directly communicate with the environment. Signals from the environment are treated quite differently from metabolic items.

This distinction is crucial and it has been not dealt with specifically in the literature except by John Gerhart and me (at least to my best knowledge). John Gerhart was a very good developmental biologist in the 1990s, he worked on signaling pathways and developmental toxicology, and rightly emphasized the difference between signals and metabolic inputs -- and seemingly nobody paid attention to him.

Suzan Mazur: Is biosemiotics part of this?

Pedro Marijuán: Not really. Most of biosemiotics follows more or less directly the central dogma of Francis Crick, i.e., that information flows from DNA to RNA to proteins. And this is like basic mechanics. This is mechanical information that the cell has, of course.

But, again, the cell communicates with the environment via specific signaling pathways. This is the essence of all prokaryotic activity. And this is the essence of multicellular development.

The whole signaling system has enormous complexity, even in "simple" prokaryotes, as they have sophisticated signaling with the environment -- the "1-2-3 component systems scheme." But the whole of biosemiotics, so to speak, is not founded on the ability to distinguish signals from the environment, to transduce them, and to build their meaning -- biosemiotics is mostly focused on abstracting transcription-translation flows.

Almost everybody has taken a shortcut in applying information views to life. Most have followed communication engineering (Claude Shannon). Others have taken the Turing machine view. Others von Neumann's operating system. And biosemiotics also is taking a shortcut, Peircean (Charles Sanders Peirce, "the father of pragmatism") -- though the generalization may be unjust for some biosemiotic works.

Nobody's doing the deep thinking about the central issue: How information pervades cellular self-production and cellular communication. How both aspects are elegantly intertwined in order to achieve a viable life cycle.

Suzan Mazur: You're doing investigations into the dozens of signaling pathways, Wnt, Hedgehog, Notch, etc.

Pedro Marijuán: Yes, absolutely. We've written a couple of useful articles devoted to prokaryotic signaling and eukaryotic signaling on "cellular intelligences," about how productive information flows and communicative information flows are handled intelligently, adaptively, around the essential core of the life cycle. . . .

Suzan Mazur: How large is your foundation, FIS? Has it grown a lot over the last 20 years?

Pedro Marijuán: It's a public place, and I'm coordinating and promoting the discussion sessions. There is a healthy plurality of views. We conference online, and we meet every two years or so.

Europeans, Americans and scientists from other countries are well represented in FIS. We have a remarkable representation of Chinese intellectuals and scientists, who are very involved in information science and who are doing interesting philosophical research as well as introducing information science into their educational and research systems.

One of the missions of FIS is organizing a sound body of new thinking about the informational cohesion of the physical, biological, and social realms. As a basis, a new vision of biological information is needed -- that's a personal concern of mine.

Communicative cells, and the cell cycle, are central to this. The living cell in an organism doesn't know what to do. It needs some specific signals from the environment to advance in particular directions, even to continue with the "inertia" of its own cycle. So, the cell in the multicellular system scans multiple environmental cues to be told what to do. "What should I do with my life?" -- asks the cell.

"Oh, you should stop growing, says the environment. Oh, you should reproduce faster. Oh, you should differentiate. Oh, you should kill yourself."

The cell continuously takes advice from the surrounding environment on what to do next, via its enormous multiplicity of signaling pathways. Like us via our own senses, and with all our conversation exchanges and social acquaintances around. . . .

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The Myth Of Moral Ambiguity In Autonomous Cars

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Image source: PhotoDune

When most vehicle manufacturers expect autonomous cars to be on the market by 2019 ― with more than 10 million on roads in 2020 ― one would expect people to start considering the various issues driverless cars create. For example, there are thousands of legal considerations to make, especially because different states or countries might enact different regulations on autonomous vehicles, preventing their owners from traveling from one place to another.

Yet, most people find these practical concerns incredibly dull. A much more exciting topic in regards to driverless cars is, surprisingly, ethics. Thanks to articles in the Atlantic (and elsewhere), giant swaths of the population have begun to question whether we can trust robot cars to make correct ethical decisions. What most people don't realize, however, is that these conversations are absolutely meaningless.

A Brief Discussion of Robots

Almost since their inception (in a 1920 Czech play) robots have incited discussions about ethics. Especially as science and tech inches ever closer to humanoid machines and artificial intelligence, people are becoming more concerned about the management of robots in all their forms. As we continue to establish egalitarian order in our society, discussions about robots are becoming more and more prevalent.

In simple terms, robots are not people, but by adding human-like traits to robots, such as voices, humanoid shape, or facial features, causes most humans to see the machines almost as equals. A handful of organizations have developed in support of robot rights; conversely, as robots continue to hijack vast numbers of jobs, other people are developing feelings of antipathy toward unconscious technology.

The Most Popular Ethical Issue with Driverless Cars

However, these ethical concerns are not the most popular discussions about autonomous cars. More commonly, non-academic writers and readers prefer to examine what is commonly called "The Trolley Problem." Undoubtedly, you've heard of it before:

A runaway trolley is careening down the street, heading toward a group of pedestrians who are milling about on the tracks. The trolley's conductor is limited in her ability to mitigate the damage; she can allow the trolley to continue on its course, hitting the crowd and causing injury to many people, or she can flip a switch, directing the trolley down an alternate route where the tracks are blocked by a lone child, who will certainly die from the collision.

There are dozens of variations of the trolley problem. In one, it is not the conductor's dilemma, but a bystander's, who has the opportunity to sacrifice one person for the sake of others. In another tale, the trolley conductor has the opportunity to derail the trolley, harming the people inside rather than anyone outside.

We only need to tweak the typical trolley problem to apply it to driverless cars:

"A driverless car is moving at speed on a crowded highway. An obstacle appears in the car's lane, forcing it to make a decision: It can swerve right to collide with an SUV, swerve left to hit a motorcyclist, or continue straight and certainly crash into the obstacle."

In each instance, the driverless car causes harm, but it is the robot car who decides the recipient of the harm. Again, there are several variations, some much more similar to the original trolley problem, but each raises a significant ethical question: Can we trust a car to make the right choice?

The Real Ethical Problems Driverless Cars Face

Most of us have driven cars for most of our lives, amassing thousands of miles on the road, and few (if any) have ever experienced such an unbearable ethical choice. Even putting aside the unlikelihood of such a scenario, we must remember that a human driver would never experience the opportunity to make a decision; rather, with only fractions of a second, human drivers would unconsciously react with little regard for costs or benefits or moral justice. If it isn't an ethical decision for a driver, it can hardly be an ethical decision for a robot car.

In actuality, no machines have the power to make decisions ever, regardless of time frame. Robots function because they have to, and the "decisions" they make are only protocols written by their programmers. Therefore, a more pressing ethical question when it comes to driverless cars is that of blame: If an autonomous vehicle malfunctions, who is responsible for the harm it causes? It could be the owner, manufacturer, or programmer.

In a traditional car collision, the drivers are under investigation, unless the collision is the result of machine malfunction, like Ford's potential brake failures, in which case the manufacturer is at fault. Yet in a driverless car, a collision should only occur when it cannot be avoided ― in which case, is it the liability of the programmer for not foreseeing such a situation?

Bottom Line:

These ethical problems are more pressing because they could stall the release of driverless cars onto the market. Before we can put autonomous vehicles on the road, manufacturers, insurers, and legislators must make a decision ― and not one that has anything to do with a trolley.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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A Brief Discussion of Robots

The Most Popular Ethical Issue with Driverless Cars

The Real Ethical Problems Driverless Cars Face