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posted by martyb on Tuesday May 26 2020, @08:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-asleep? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The study published today in Physical Review Research describes how tools from physics and complexity theory were used to determine the level of consciousness in fruit flies.

"This is a major problem in neuroscience, where it is crucial to differentiate between unresponsive vegetative patients and those suffering from a condition in which a patient is aware but cannot move or communicate verbally because of complete paralysis of nearly all voluntary muscles in the body," said study author Dr. Kavan Modi, from the Monash University School of Physics and Astronomy.

[...] "Our technique allows us to distinguish between flies that have been anesthetized and those that have not, by calculating the time-complexity of the signals," said Dr. Modi.

[...] The research team studied the brain signals produced by 13 fruit flies both when they were awake and when they were anesthetized. They then analyzed the signals to see how complex they were.

"We found the statistical complexity to be larger when a [fly] is awake than when the same [fly] is anaesthetized," Dr. Modi said.

[...] The researchers concluded that applying a similar analysis to other datasets, in particular, human EEG data could lead to new discoveries regarding the relationship between consciousness and complexity.

Journal Reference
Roberto N. Muñoz, et. al. General anesthesia reduces complexity and temporal asymmetry of the informational structures derived from neural recordings in Drosophila, Phys. Rev. Research 2, 023219 (2020)

Also reported at: www.scimex.org


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday May 26 2020, @01:15PM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday May 26 2020, @01:15PM (#999194) Journal

    your maker will disassemble you and repurpose your parts when you're outlived your usefulness

    Chances are the Bot's maker is EthanolFueled.
    The facts are consistent with the hypothesis: the creation is lamentably flawed and the maker is in derelection of his duty to disassemble the useless Bot.

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:05AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 27 2020, @05:05AM (#999519)

    Useless? Not quite, with a little composting shit can make some great fertilizer.