286,110 research outputs found
Immune cognition, social justice and asthma: structured stress and the developing immune system
We explore the implications of IR Cohen's work on immune
cognition for understanding rising rates of asthma morbidity
and mortality in the US. Immune cognition is conjoined with
central nervous system cognition, and with the cognitive
function of the embedding sociocultural networks by which
individuals are acculturated and through which they work with others to meet challenges of threat and opportunity.
Using a mathematical model, we find that externally-
imposed patterns of 'structured stress' can, through their
effect on a child's socioculture, become synergistic with
the development of immune cognition, triggering the persistence of an atopic Th2 phenotype, a necessary precursor to asthma and other immune disease. Reversal of the rising tide of asthma and related chronic diseases in the US thus seems unlikely without a 21st Century version of the earlier Great Urban Reforms which ended the scourge of infectious diseases
Selection pressure and organizational cognition: implications for the social determinants of health
We model the effects of Schumperterian 'selecton pressures' -- in particular Apartheid and the neoliberal 'market economy' -- on organizational cognition in minority communities, given the special role of culture in human biology. Our focus is on the dual-function social networks by which culture is imposed and maintained on individuals and by which immediate patterns of opportunity and threat are recognized and given response. A mathematical model based on recent advances in complexity theory displays a joint cross-scale linkage of social, individual central nervous system, and immune cognition with external selection pressure through mixed and synergistic punctuated 'learning plateaus.' This provides a natural mechanism for addressing the social determinants of health at the individual level. The implications of the model, particularly the predictions of synergistic punctuation, appear to be empirically testable
Predicting Health Impacts of the World Trade Center Disaster: 1. Halogenated hydrocarbons, symptom syndromes, secondary victimization, and the burdens of history
The recent attack on the World Trade Center, in addition to direct injury and psychological trauma, has exposed a vast population to dioxins, dibenzofurans, related endocrine disruptors, and a multitude of other physiologically active chemicals arising from the decomposition of the massive quantities of halogenated hydrocarbons and other plastics within the affected buildings. The impacts of these chemical species have been compounded by exposure to asbestos, fiberglass, crushed glass, concrete, plastic, and other irritating dusts. To address the manifold complexities of this incident we combine recent theoretical perspectives on immune, CNS, and sociocultural cognition with empirical studies on survivors of past large toxic fires, other community-scale chemical exposure incidents, and the aftereffects of war. Our analysis suggests the appearance of complex, but distinct and characteristic, spectra of synergistically linked social, psychosocial, psychological and physical symptoms among the 100,000 or so persons most directly affected by the WTC attack. The different 'eigenpatterns' should become increasingly comorbid as a function of exposure. The expected outcome greatly transcends a simple 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder' model, and may resemble a particularly acute form of Gulf War Syndrome. We explore the role of external social factors in subsequent exacerbation of the syndrome -- secondary victimization -- and study the path-dependent influence of individual and community-level historical patterns of stress. We suggest that workplace and other organizations can act as ameliorating intermediaries. Those without acess to such buffering structures appear to face a particularly bleak future
Acetylcholine neuromodulation in normal and abnormal learning and memory: vigilance control in waking, sleep, autism, amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease
This article provides a unified mechanistic neural explanation of how learning, recognition, and cognition break down during Alzheimer's disease, medial temporal amnesia, and autism. It also clarifies whey there are often sleep disturbances during these disorders. A key mechanism is how acetylcholine modules vigilance control in cortical layer
Learning long-range spatial dependencies with horizontal gated-recurrent units
Progress in deep learning has spawned great successes in many engineering
applications. As a prime example, convolutional neural networks, a type of
feedforward neural networks, are now approaching -- and sometimes even
surpassing -- human accuracy on a variety of visual recognition tasks. Here,
however, we show that these neural networks and their recent extensions
struggle in recognition tasks where co-dependent visual features must be
detected over long spatial ranges. We introduce the horizontal gated-recurrent
unit (hGRU) to learn intrinsic horizontal connections -- both within and across
feature columns. We demonstrate that a single hGRU layer matches or outperforms
all tested feedforward hierarchical baselines including state-of-the-art
architectures which have orders of magnitude more free parameters. We further
discuss the biological plausibility of the hGRU in comparison to anatomical
data from the visual cortex as well as human behavioral data on a classic
contour detection task.Comment: Published at NeurIPS 2018
https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7300-learning-long-range-spatial-dependencies-with-horizontal-gated-recurrent-unit
- âŠ