Publications by authors named "Leo Pio-Lopez"
Article Synopsis
- Maintaining tissue order is essential throughout life; failure leads to aging, organ malfunction, and diseases like cancer.
- The article presents a new perspective on aging, suggesting it's not just due to cellular damage but also linked to bioelectricity and morphostasis defects that disrupt tissue homeostasis.
- It explores the idea that bioelectric signaling could connect aging and regeneration, proposing research into "morphoceuticals" to promote healthy longevity and advance our understanding of development, aging, cancer, and regeneration.
Complex living agents consist of cells, which are themselves competent sub-agents navigating physiological and metabolic spaces. Behaviour science, evolutionary developmental biology and the field of machine intelligence all seek to understand the scaling of biological cognition: what enables individual cells to integrate their activities to result in the emergence of a novel, higher-level intelligence with large-scale goals and competencies that belong to it and not to its parts? Here, we report the results of simulations based on the TAME framework, which proposes that evolution pivoted the collective intelligence of cells during morphogenesis of the body into traditional behavioural intelligence by scaling up homeostatic competencies of cells in metabolic space. In this article, we created a minimal system (two-dimensional neural cellular automata) and tested the hypothesis that evolutionary dynamics are sufficient for low-level setpoints of metabolic homeostasis in individual cells to scale up to tissue-level emergent behaviour.
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- Morphoceuticals are innovative interventions aimed at regulating anatomical stability and promoting growth and form through targeted approaches.
- A specific type of morphoceuticals, called electroceuticals, focuses on the bioelectrical communication between cells that influences gene expression and growth adaptation.
- The research outlines a potential strategy for drug development that leverages bioelectric signals to enhance regenerative medicine, prevent cancer, and combat aging.
Article Synopsis
- Active inference is a theory in neuroscience that explains how actions and perceptions work together to create optimal behaviors and can also be linked to various mental health disorders.
- The article connects this theory to morphogenesis, the process by which cells organize themselves, suggesting that disorders in this area can be viewed similarly to mental health disorders as problems in information processing.
- Four simulations are presented to demonstrate how issues with active inference in a group of cells can lead to development problems, including experimental results showing that a dopamine antagonist can help by reducing sensory precision in embryos.
Article Synopsis
- Network embedding approaches are increasingly useful for analyzing various network types, excelling in tasks like community detection and node classification, but few are tailored for multiplex networks.
- This study introduces MultiVERSE, an enhanced version of the VERSE framework, designed to efficiently learn node embeddings from multiplex and multiplex-heterogeneous networks using advanced techniques like Random Walks with Restart.
- MultiVERSE has shown superior performance in link prediction and network reconstruction across multiple biological and social networks, and it is available for use on GitHub.
Article Synopsis
- The potential of electrical stimulation in the visual cortices could help restore vision for blind individuals, but current prosthetic advancements still have limitations in providing full vision restoration.
- Renewed interest in this area is spurred by technological improvements, though challenges remain, particularly in the safe and effective stimulation of brain tissue.
- The review examines electrode-based visual prosthetics, focusing on the interface between electrodes and tissue, insights into perception through stimulation, and the ongoing challenges in design and implementation for future visual prosthetics.
Recent research suggests that conceptual or emotional factors could influence the perceptual processing of stimuli. In this article, we aimed to evaluate the effect of social information (positive, negative, or no information related to the character of the target) on subjective (perceived and felt valence and arousal), physiological (facial mimicry) as well as on neural (P100 and N170) responses to dynamic emotional facial expressions (EFE) that varied from neutral to one of the six basic emotions. Across three studies, the results showed reduced ratings of valence and arousal of EFE associated with incongruent social information (Study 1), increased electromyographical responses (Study 2), and significant modulation of P100 and N170 components (Study 3) when EFE were associated with social (positive and negative) information (vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFActive inference is a general framework for perception and action that is gaining prominence in computational and systems neuroscience but is less known outside these fields. Here, we discuss a proof-of-principle implementation of the active inference scheme for the control or the 7-DoF arm of a (simulated) PR2 robot. By manipulating visual and proprioceptive noise levels, we show under which conditions robot control under the active inference scheme is accurate.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBalancing habitual and deliberate forms of choice entails a comparison of their respective merits-the former being faster but inflexible, and the latter slower but more versatile. Here, we show that arbitration between these two forms of control can be derived from first principles within an Active Inference scheme. We illustrate our arguments with simulations that reproduce rodent spatial decisions in T-mazes.
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