Computer Vision - Text Therapy - Early Activity - Sleep Cleansing

[Breedlove, S]

https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/technology/2025/how-computers-are-getting-better-recognizing-images

Computers are getting much better at learning to “see”

By Kaia Glickman 

Anyone with a computer has been asked to “select every image containing a traffic light” or “type the letters shown below” to prove that they are human. While these log-in hurdles — called reCAPTCHA tests — may prompt some head-scratching (does the corner of that red light count?), they reflect that vision is considered a clear metric for differentiating computers from humans. But computers are catching up.

The quest to create computers that can “see” has made huge progress in recent years. Fifteen years ago, computers could correctly identify what an image contains about 60 percent of the time. Now, it’s common to see success rates near 90 percent. But many computer systems still fail some of the simplest vision tests — thus reCAPTCHA’s continued usefulness.

Digital artwork, one in a series displayed at CERN in Geneva. The foreground shows a particle collision event which is a possible candidate for a decay of the Higgs-like particle to a final state. The background depicts selected pages from articles published by the CMS collaboration at the LHC.

Newer approaches aim to more closely resemble the human visual system by training computers to see images as they are — made up of actual objects — rather than as just a collection of pixels. These efforts are already yielding success, for example in helping develop robots that can “see” and grab objects.

Computer vision models employ what are called visual neural networks. These networks use interconnected units called artificial neurons that, akin to in the brain, forge connections with each other as the system learns. Typically, these networks are trained on a set of images with descriptions, and eventually they can correctly guess what is in a new image they haven’t encountered before.
--------------------


https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/health/text-therapy-effectiveness.html

Study Finds Evidence That Text-Based Therapy Eases Depression

By Ellen Barry

One of the most popular mental health innovations of the past decade is therapy via text message, which allows you to dip in and out of treatment in the course of a day. Say you wake up anxious before a presentation: You might text your therapist first thing in the morning to say that you can’t stop visualizing a humiliating failure.

Three hours later, her response pops up on your phone. She suggests that you label the thought — “I’m feeling nervous about my presentation” — and then try to reframe it. She tells you to take a deep breath before deciding what is true in the moment.

You read her answer between meetings. “I’m pretty sure my boss thinks I’m an idiot,” you type. The therapist responds the next morning. “What evidence do you have that she thinks that?” she asks. She tells you to write a list of the available evidence, pros and cons.

Text-based therapy has expanded swiftly over the past decade through digital mental health platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace, which pair users with licensed therapists and offer both live chat and as-needed texting sessions. A new study published on Thursday in the journal JAMA Network Open provides early evidence that the practice is effective in treating mild to moderate depression, finding outcomes similar to those of video-based therapy.

In a clinical trial, 850 adults with mild to moderate depression were randomly assigned to two groups: One group received psychotherapy via a weekly video session; the other received unlimited, as-needed messaging or emailing with a therapist. After 12 weeks, participants in both groups reported similar improvement in depression symptoms.

    © 2025 The New York Times Company
--------------------


https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/ramping-up-cortical-activity-in-early-life-sparks-autism-like-behaviors-in-mice/

Ramping up cortical activity in early life sparks autism-like behaviors in mice

By Sarah DeWeerdt

A temporary increase in neuronal activity in the cortex of newborn mice leads to social deficits in adulthood, according to a new preprint. Those adult rodents also show changes in brain electrical activity, gene expression and connectivity that are reminiscent of autism.

The analysis lends support to a prominent hypothesis of autism’s origins, which holds that the condition can arise from an excess of excitatory signaling or insufficient inhibitory signaling in the brain, the study investigators write in their paper.

Over the years, support for this signaling imbalance hypothesis has come from other studies in mice and observations that some people with autism have seizures or display excess neuronal activity in electroencephalography (EEG) recordings relative to people without the condition. Postmortem analysis suggests autistic people have more excitatory synapses in the prefrontal cortex than non-autistic people. But determining causality and the role of inhibitory signaling has been difficult.

In contrast with most earlier work, the new study “really underscore[s] a different way of looking at excitation-inhibition imbalance, which is looking at it during development as a cause of subsequent changes in brain function that could be associated with autism,” says Vikaas Sohal, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the work.

The study was posted on bioRxiv last month.

© 2025 Simons Foundation
--------------------


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/oct/29/brain-changes-lapses-of-attention-tired-sleep-deprived

Scans shed light on changes in brain when we zone out while tired

Ian Sample Science editor

It’s never a great look. The morning meeting is in full swing but thanks to a late night out your brain switches off at the precise moment a question comes your way.

Such momentary lapses in attention are a common problem for the sleep deprived, but what happens in the brain in these spells of mental shutdown has proved hard to pin down.

Now scientists have shed light on the process and found there is more to zoning out than meets the eye. The brief loss of focus coincides with a wave of fluid flowing out of the brain, which returns once attention recovers.

“The moment somebody’s attention fails is the moment this wave of fluid starts to pulse,” said Dr Laura Lewis, a senior author on the study at MIT in Boston. “It’s not just that your neurons aren’t paying attention to the world, there’s this big change in fluid in the brain at the same time.”

Lewis and her colleague Dr Zinong Yang investigated the sleep-deprived brain to understand the kinds of attention failures that lead drowsy drivers to crash and tired animals to become a predator’s lunch.

In the study, 26 volunteers took turns to wear an EEG cap while lying in an fMRI scanner. This enabled the scientists to monitor the brain’s electrical activity and physiological changes during tests in which people had to respond as quickly as possible to hearing a tone or seeing crosshairs on a screen turn into a square.

Each volunteer was scanned after a restful night’s sleep at home and after a night of total sleep deprivation supervised by scientists at the laboratory. Unsurprisingly, people performed far worse when sleep deprived, responding more slowly or not at all.

© 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited 
--------------------


https://connectsci.au/news/news-parent/6974/Sleep-deprived-brains-clean-themselves-while-awake?searchresult=1

Sleep deprived brains clean themselves while awake

Imma Perfetto

Anyone who has ever struggled through the day following a poor night’s sleep has had to wrench their attention back to the task at hand after their mind drifted off unexpectedly.

Now, researchers have pinpointed exactly what causes these momentary failures of attention.

The new study in Nature Neuroscience found that the brains of sleep-deprived people initiate waves of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), the liquid which cushions the brain, which dramatically impaired attention.

This process usually happens during sleep. The rhythmic flow of CSF into and out of the brain carries away protein waste which has built up over the course of the day.

When this is maintenance interrupted due to lack of sleep, it seems the brain attempts to play catch up during its waking hours.

“If you don’t sleep, the CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them,” says study senior author Laura Lewis of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

“However, they come with an attentional trade off, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow.

“The results are suggesting that at the moment that attention fails, this fluid is actually being expelled outward away from the brain. And when attention recovers, it’s drawn back in.”
   © Copyright CSIRO


--------------------


https://undark.org/2025/10/30/opinion-cbd-safety-teenage-brain/

CBD’s Unseen Effects on the Teenage Brain

By Nima Sadrian

In the popular narrative, cannabidiol, or CBD, is portrayed as a natural, non-intoxicating cure for a host of ailments — and sometimes that extends to the anxieties of modern adolescence. CBD is everywhere, infused in products such as gummy candies, vapes, skincare serums, and even fizzy seltzers. Usually derived from the hemp plant, CBD is pitched as a calming remedy with none of the stigma of marijuana. Even a 2018 World Health Organization report noted that CBD shows no signs of abuse or dependence potential.

But as a physician and neuroscientist who studies how CBD affects the developing brain, I have to offer a different, more troubling answer: We simply don’t know if it’s safe for teens. And early evidence suggests potential for real, lasting harm. The comforting story our culture tells itself about CBD — that it offers harmless, botanical relief for stress and sleep problems — is dangerously out of step with the science. While we have been sold a simple wellness narrative, my own work and that of other scientists reveal a far more complex and cautionary tale — one that challenges the very foundation of the multibillion-dollar CBD industry.

How did a compound that the Food and Drug Administration has only approved as a potent prescription drug for severe childhood epilepsy become a common additive? The answer lies in a catastrophic regulatory failure. The 2018 farm bill legalized hemp, but the legislation and its extensions created no framework to ensure that the products made from it were safe, effective, or accurately labeled, nor did the bill set an age limit for it.

The result is a market that operates like the Wild West, a gold rush where consumer safety is an afterthought. The FDA-approved CBD medicine, Epidiolex, comes with a long list of documented risks, including liver damage and suicidal ideation, and requires careful medical supervision. Yet numerous consumer products containing CBD are sold without such warnings, mandatory testing, or oversight. 
--------------------