In Tibetan Buddhism, the group of tantric techniques known as milam aim to reveal the illusory nature of waking life by having practitioners perform yoga in their dreams. It’s a ritualised version of one of the most mysterious faculties of the human mind: to know that we’re dreaming even while asleep, a state known as lucid dreaming.
Source: aeon.co
In humans, the profound biological differences that exist between the sexes mean that a single male is physically capable of having far more children than is a single female. Women carry unborn children for nine months and often nurse them for several years prior to having additional children. Men, meanwhile, are able to procreate while investing far less time in the bearing and early rearing of each child.
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This is an example of what’s called an adversarial image: an image specifically designed to fool neural networks into making an incorrect determination about what they’re looking at. Researchers at Google Brain decided to try and figure out whether the same techniques that fool artificial neural networks can also fool the biological neural networks inside of our heads, by developing adversarial images capable of making both computers and humans think that they’re looking at something they aren’t.
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The hallmark of intelligence is the ability to learn. As decades of research have shown, our brains exhibit a high degree of “plasticity,” meaning that neurons can rewire their connections in response to new stimuli. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have recently discovered surprising constraints on our learning abilities.
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