… While COVID-19 has not yet been proven as a cause for brain fog, researchers have found there is a correlation between the two.
“There’s certainly a higher report of brain fog among individuals who have COVID-19 to folks who have not been affected by it,” said Dr. Andrew Levine, a neuropsychologist at UCLA.
A study conducted by neurologists at Columbia University found that lingering neurological issues can affect all patients that have tested positive for the coronavirus, even those who never required medical attention. That group would include Newton, who was asymptomatic.
In 2008, neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes conducted a set of experiments at the Bernstein Centre for Computational Neuroscience (Berlin) with the goal to learn more about the mechanisms of free will in human beings. The team of scientists used a brain scan to investigate what happens in the human brain just before making a decision.
In the study, participants were asked to lie down inside a magnetic resonance tomograph (MRT) with a push-button in each hand. The instructions were simple: they had to press the button they wanted at the time they wanted. They were only asked to remember the exact moment they had decided to push it. After analysing the data, the results were surprising: it could be predicted up to ten seconds in advance what decision the participants were going to make. The brain “knew” what it was going to do up to ten seconds before they were aware of their own decision. Previous research had shown that someone’s intentions could be predicted from their brain activity, but it had never been demonstrated that a decision made in the future could be predicted.
This work leads us to ask ourselves: is it really necessary to be aware of a decision in order to make it? According to Haynes’ team results, it is not.
In September Tadej Pogačar won a dramatic Stage 20 time trial, a feat that also gave him overall honours for the 2020 Tour de France cycle race. Barely 22 (it was his birthday the following day), the Slovenian became the event’s second youngest champion; Frenchman Henri Cornet was 19 when he took the title in 1904.
Not only was Pogačar’s win unexpected – he only became an elite cyclist last year – but his victory is also part of an extraordinary ascent up the world team rankings by UAE Team Emirates, whose medical team is led by Associate Professor Jeroen Swart and includes several other doctors from the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Division of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine, based at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa (SSISA).
For Associate Professor Swart, the programme director for sports and exercise medicine at the Division of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine, the appointment as medical director of UAE Team Emirates in January 2019 was the realisation of a dream that began when he was 11 years old.
… Finding your optimal cardio workout might seem like a complicated project, but it turns out that you can achieve your best cardio self by mastering a few fundamentals.
I asked some experts to identify the key features of an ideal cardio program and answer questions like: How much cardio training do you need to do? Can short bursts of exercise really make you fit? How hard do you have to push yourself to get benefits? Are intervals really necessary?
As people age, they often lose their motivation to learn new things or engage in everyday activities. In a study of mice, MIT neuroscientists have now identified a brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation.
This circuit is particularly important for learning to make decisions that require evaluating the cost and reward that come with a particular action. The researchers showed that they could boost older mice’s motivation to engage in this type of learning by reactivating this circuit, and they could also decrease motivation by suppressing the circuit.
“As we age, it’s harder to have a get-up-and-go attitude toward things,” says Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at MIT and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “This get-up-and-go, or engagement, is important for our social well-being and for learning — it’s tough to learn if you aren’t attending and engaged.”
Whoop has closed a $100 million Series E Financing round, valuing the company at $1.2 billion.
Several professional athletes including Patrick Mahomes and Rory McIlroy are investors in the company
Whoop has seen a surge in business during the coronavirus pandemic as it has been an effective tool for some of its users in noticing early onset Covid symptoms.
Catching traumatic injuries before they become worse… There’s an app for that.
“There’s not a sport that’s immune from concussion,” says Head Athletic Trainer for Bullard ISD, Jeff “Doc” Shrode.
In the past, Texas schools have grouped their athletes in computer labs to perform Impact Tests. Bullard ISD is one of nearly 30 schools partnering with Baylor Scott & White Texas Joint and Spine Hospital to use “HitCheck,” a phone or computer app for trainers to help student-athletes who suffer head injuries during the season.
“It is one tool in a toolbox of things we use to diagnose concussions and also get return-to-play,” Shrode says.
Minnesota health officials say they have connected more than 3,400 COVID-19 cases to sports, requiring 7,000 households to isolate.
In a news conference Monday, state infectious disease expert Kris Ehresmann said 593 of those cases have been traced to high school athletes and 309 more have been traced to middle school athletes.
The Daily Northwestern student newspaper, Abbie Wolf from
This past May, I should have been in a great mindset: Northwestern finished the season ranked 11th in the AP poll, I earned All-Big 10 Honorable Mention and I just signed with an agent overseas. It looked like my dream of playing professional basketball was coming true.
But May was the first full month of quarantine, and it also happened to be Mental Health Awareness month.
I realized that throughout my college experience, I’d hid many sleepless nights and therapy sessions from my loved ones. My mental health felt like something I should keep to myself — I didn’t need to talk about it.
But, I want to tell every college student-athlete that it’s socially acceptable to take care of your mental health.
The technical term is “directed onion decomposition.”
It describes how centrally embedded an individual is in a network of others. The deeper in this “onion” they are, the more connections they have. The network being studied: NHL Hockey fights.
Researchers at the University of Vermont, the University of Colorado Boulder, and Dartmouth College analyzed 10 years of hockey fight data and reconstructed these brawls into a network where lines were drawn between participants. They found that hockey enforcers who were more centrally connected to others through combat tended to be stronger fighters.
Because “enforcers”—whose primary role is to protect their teammates, intimidate opponents, and fight—are a small proportion of hockey players, they provide a model for how network structure can reveal features of how people who participate in non-normative behaviors function in a “society.”
University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, Chicago Booth Review, Jeff Cockrell from
Data science has created more and better applications for algorithms, particularly those that use machine learning, to help predict outcomes of interest to humans. But has the progress of algorithmic decision aids outpaced people’s willingness to trust them? Whether humans will put their faith in self-driving cars, ML-powered employment screening, and countless other technologies depends on not only the performance of algorithms, but also how would-be users perceive that performance.
In 2015, Chicago Booth’s Berkeley J. Dietvorst, with University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph P. Simmons and Cade Massey, coined the phrase “algorithm aversion” to describe people’s tendency to distrust the predictions of algorithms, even after seeing them outperform humans. Now, further research from Dietvorst and Booth PhD student Soaham Bharti suggests that people may not be averse to algorithms per se but rather are willing to take risks in pursuit of exceptional accuracy: they prefer the relatively high variance in how well human forecasters perform, especially in uncertain contexts. If there’s a higher likelihood of getting very good forecasts, they’ll put up with a higher likelihood of very bad ones.
… Acclimating players to the physical demands of a regular-season game is one of the most important reasons for their preseason training. The NFL Players Association created a joint committee of doctors, strength coaches and trainers to establish its recommendations on how players should prepare before the 2020 NFL season. The committee suggested a 48-day preseason, with 21 days of strength and conditioning and 10 days of non-contact ramp-up. The league ignored the NFLPA’s requests in an effort to start the season on time, providing only six to seven days of strength and conditioning, and five days of non-contact ramp-up. NFLPA President J.C. Tretter published a statement expressing his displeasure with the NFL’s decision.
“Despite these experts’ assessment that teams face a serious risk of player-injury spikes this year (based on past NFL data and recent findings from sports leagues that have already returned to play this year), the NFL is unwilling to prioritize player safety,” Tretter said. His frustrations stemmed from evidence that players needed more time to prepare.
When policymakers focus on costs and benefits, they often find that hard questions become easy – as, for example, when the benefits clearly exceed the costs, or when the costs clearly exceed the benefits. In some cases, however, benefits or costs are difficult to quantify, perhaps because of limitations in scientific knowledge. In extreme cases, policymakers are proceeding in circumstances of uncertainty rather than risk, in the sense that they cannot assign probabilities to various outcomes. We suggest that in difficult cases in which important information is absent, it is useful for policymakers to consider a concept from poker: ‘freerolls.’ A freeroll exists when choosers can lose nothing from selecting an option but stand to gain something (whose magnitude may itself be unknown). In some cases, people display ‘freeroll neglect.’ In terms of social justice, John Rawls’ defense of the difference principle is grounded in the idea that, behind the veil of ignorance, choosers have a freeroll. In terms of regulatory policy, one of the most promising defenses of the Precautionary Principle sees it as a kind of freeroll. Some responses to climate change, pandemics and financial crises can be seen as near-freerolls. Freerolls and near-freerolls must be distinguished from cases involving cumulatively high costs and also from faux freerolls, which can be found when the costs of an option are real and significant, but not visible. ‘Binds’ are the mirror-image of freerolls; they involve options from which people are guaranteed to lose something (of uncertain magnitude). Some regulatory options are binds, and there are faux binds as well.