Hans de Vries

I am asking about possible drift of personality traits. If we have a small founder population (200-500 individuals) who just happen to say, less neurotic or more extroverted (I'm talking about Big Five traits which are hereditary) would it be possible that the population will shift in distribution of said traits?

Ok... I am a medieval guy living approx 1300 AD. I've had a vision that the Chrisitan God is false and in reality Satan more worthy of worship. I set up an altair in my house consisting of a goat's head and a Pentagram. I gather a small group of followers and start practicing the religion. The practices are rather minimalistic, just invoking "Ave Satan!", homosexual sex and self flagellation. After some time someone denounces me to the authorities.... what happens?

Lots of folks say time flows faster the older you are. That's ofc a subjective illusion. Is there some subset of population for whom its' the other way around?

One of my favorite YT channels has just uploaded a video about Al Ghazali:

We know that there are people with very good memories. There also people with extremely vivid imagination who can basically experience their imagined world as if it was real. IT's called hyperphantasia. Would it be feasible to create (say via gene editing) a human being who would have a memory so good that he would remember every second of his life and experience it like a movie/

+1 CharonY. It is my impression (from articles and videos on this topic) that return to Sunni Orthodoxy in 11th-12th centuries was a major contributing factor to the decline of science in the Islamic world with many scholars swowly chipping away the foundations of scientific progress, culminating with Al Ghazali and that adoption of occasionalism may have resulted in a similar withering of science in the Chrisian world as well.

Yes. I should have written "have arisen"

I meant Ancient times. What if the Founding Fathers of Christianity just happened to be different people with a worldview similar to Islamic Ash'ari theology . This is true. Though for several centuries there was a heated debate between occasionalist Ash'arites and Mutazilites who were proponents of rationalistic philosophy. Ultimately the occasionalists won and the debate was never reopened again not even today. Much of this is blamed on Al Ghazali even though he was just the last one in a long line of thinkers the first of whom was Ahmed Ibn Hanbal. One consequence of such a worldview is that actual science tends to be viewed as either unimportant or much less important than religious studies. For a long time the Muslim world had higher literacy rates than EUrope and a very advanced educational system but this system taught nearly exclusivelu religious subjects.

Definitely the Smartphone Age, a part of wider Electronic Age.

Occasionalism is the dominant metaphysical stance in Islam and has been for 800 years now. It states that God constantly destroys the world and creates it anew, therefore all causality observed in the world is an illusion. Hence, studying the outside world is useless (because God can change t at will) and only study of theology is worthwhile. Catholic Church choose a different doctrine that God is inherently rational and by studying the world we are studying God (because he created the world) Could a similar philosophical stance arise in Christianity? Let's say some very charismatic and influential of the Church Fathers expresses a view similar to the Islamic one and it just gets picked up by later philosophers/theologians and becomes predominant. Would development of science be stiffled?

How would an infinite number of meowing cats sound like?

Ketamone and esketamine were the first breakthrough in psychiatry in 30 years. What do you think could the next breakthrough in psychiatry be?

Maybe - I don't know I wonder if writing in the West could have taken a similar route i.e. from disconected block letters to this flowing, curly, looping style as seen in the Arabic script.

IF you look at Greek and Latin scripts, you should see that it looks similar to it's predecessor the Phoenician script. How and why did Arabic script go into opposite direction evolution-wise? All other scripts derived from the Phoenician script also look kinda blocky.

Does epigenetics apply to single alleles as well? If two alleles are expressed equally, would it be possible to silence one allele using epigenetic effects?

What causes them? Are they caused more by structural changes in the brain or more by neurotransmitter abnormalities? A drug that was to be the first to target negative symtoms of schizophrenia (roluperidone) has just failed phase 3 trials.

https://www.jneurology.com/articles/regulation-of-adult-neurogenesis-in-the-cerebral-cortex.html

Does it exist in the human brain/ We have well established evidence of neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus and the subventricular zone. Is there neurogenesis in the cortex? Some time ago I came across a paper proving that it does.

What if you modified the brain of a living human in a significant way? What would happen if make the prefrontal cortex 2x thicker? Or temporal lobe? Or give him 2x bigger hippocampus?

But if you change gene expression of white blood cells to resemble the gene expression of muscle cells, will you literally get muscle floating in your blood?

Lets say you take some kind of cells that divide fast like white blood cells and change their epigenome to resemble some other kind of cells, muscle cells for example. What happens?

Microbiome transplant reduced core symptoms of autism by almost 50%. FDA was so impressed that it fast tracked the treatment https://www.healio.com/pediatrics/autism-spectrum-disorders/news/online/{6b8a390d-1f6a-4f24-ac73-ee831f0c20e0}/fda-fast-tracks-microbiota-therapy-for-children-with-autism There are studies of mice developing schizophrenia like behaviors after a microbiome transplant from humans with schizophrenia https://www.biocodexmicrobiotainstitute.com/en/publications/schizophrenia-and-microbiota-has-link-been-confirmed Anxious mice become less anxious after a microbiome transplant from courageous mice and vice versa https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31124390/

We all know the reports of microbiome transplant allevating symptoms of autism and even changing some personality traits. What would happen if you transplant a microbiome from another species (a tiger for example) into a human?

What are your thoughts on hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) for brain disorders? Possible mechanisms of action; - reduction of neuroinflammation, oxidative stress and apoptosis - stimulation of angiogenesis, neurogenesis and synaptogenesis - repair of white matter - increase of blood volume and blood flow to the brain

When you think will first drugs to repair damaged brain hit the market?