ThinQ Nasir

Artificial Intelligence: Friend or Foe? Manahle Thabet, PhD Brain expert We are living in the age of algorithms, and AI is the natural next step in this age’s evolution. We can’t excise the tech from our lives, but we can benefit from it more and protect even the most vulnerable from abuses by shaping how we use it. AI: The tool Many people worry about artificial intelligence (AI) eliminating jobs and displacing workers, or even taking over human society. A February 2016 report from Citibank and the University of Oxford predicted that  automation threatens 47 percent of U.S. jobs , 35 percent of U.K. jobs, and 77 percent of jobs in China. An August report from Forrester stated that customer service and transportation jobs will be  gone by 2025 , and that we’ll feel the impact of this change within five years. These fears aren’t unfounded, but they may need refocusing. Few of us understand what algorithms are or how they work; to most o...

Keeping Our Thoughts Private in the Age of Mind-Reading Manahel Thabet, PhD Brain expert With brain computer interfaces (BCIs) having become commercially available after extensive use in the medical sector, recent research has found that they can be used to hack our brains for PINs or mine our minds for data. What is an EEG, and what have studies concerning its security found? Two new studies by the  University of Alabama  and the  University of Washington  have revealed the malicious possibilities lurking in the shadows of impressive promises of brain-computer interface (BCI) developers: the ability to access PINs and other private information. Electroencephalograms (EEG) are tests that detect electrical activity in your brain using a skullcap studded with electrodes. This technology has been used in the medical sector for years — for example,  to diagnose schizophrenia  as far back as 1998. However it is now due to be used fo...

One powerful way for improving your Working Memory George Castaneda PhD , CEO, World Brain Academy Whenever we execute tasks entailing reasoning, comprehension, creativity, and learning, we use our working memory. It allows us to hold relevant information in the conscious part of our brain.  When performing the act of ‘thinking’, it manipulates information through the complex interaction with other brain networks, going back and forth between the unconscious and conscious networks. Therefore, working memory could be conceived as a powerful mental scratch pad that not only stores your thoughts and ideas in the short term, but more importantly, enables to combine, reorganize, and synthesize information in meaningful ways for formulating hypotheses, generating ideas, solving problems, understanding things, making decisions, reaching conclusions, predicting the future, and even thinking about thinking (metacognition). As recent research has found (Chuderski, 2013), working...