AWKRSNA

 Nearly half of the adult population of the United States and one-third of the world-wide population has high high blood pressure.

Hypertension is a leading cause of heart disease and stroke yet the strategies to control the condition remain poor.

A study offers a solution for treating high blood pressure by giving patients a pill containing a quarter dose of four common medicines.

The quadpill which contains irbesartan, amlodipine, indapamide and bisoprolol has been shown to be more successful in treating hypertension than the routine practice of relying on a single drug.

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COGNITIVE HUNGER 

Higher intelligence drives ‘cognitive hunger’.

Openness to experience is the personality trait most strongly linked to higher intelligence, research finds.

People who are open to experience tend to be intellectually curious, imaginative, seekers of variety and sensitive to their feelings.

Naturally, people who are open to experience like trying out new activities and ideas.

Openness to experience is one of the fivemajor aspects of personality, along with conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness and extraversion.

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. A case in point is the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill in the United Kingdom. This was amended in 2021 to cover octopuses and lobsters (among others), following a report by a working party at The London School of Economics. Jonathan Birch, Charlotte Burn, Alexandra Schnell, Heather Browning, and Andrew Crump (2021). ‘Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans’ (London: LSE Consulting).

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The problem of perceptual space

A mother takes George, her 6-year-old child, to the zoo. An elephant stands 20 feet away separated by a low wall and a moat. George looks at the elephant. Light from the elephant is focused on George’s retina and digitized into a staccato stream of nerve impulses, which then race along the million fibers in each optic nerve. Note that the elephant did not enter George’s brain; coded impulses did. The visual signals are processed, and the next thing George knows the elephant appears in his visual perceptual space. George is the percipient, but what and where is the percept, that is, the elephant? Milliseconds before the percept appeared, all of the information describing the elephant consisted of nerve signals; the brain did not construct a flesh-and-blood pachyderm. George’s neurons exist in physical space but the percept itself is not a physical object in physical space; it is a nonphysical construct in nonphysical space. The percept is also scale free; it has no size. A 5-ton elephant will not fit into the head of a 50-pound child.

The real, physical elephant is 20 feet away from George, and the visual image that George enjoys seems to correspond with that estimated distance. However, we know that the neural machinery producing the percept is in the brain—so is the percept inside or outside George’s brain? The answer is neither, and therein lies the problem.

To assign a location in physical space, either inside or outside the skull, to a nonphysical object in nonphysical space is a nonsequitur. As Bertrand Russell pointed out 90 years ago, “Physical and perceptual space have relations, but they are not identical, and failure to grasp the difference between them is a potent source of confusion.”1 An enormous amount of time and effort has been spent in the search for the fabled anatomical correlate of consciousness. The percept is in fact a veridical illusion. Like a rainbow, it is real but intangible.

The problem with consciousness is to explain the subjective with objective empirical measurements

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