There are nearly seven million people currently diagnosed with Alzheimer's in the US, and while there is no cure, experts are searching for ways to prevent it. That is because stories about far off lands and mythical creatures require readers to remember what happened early on in the book to understand the ending. 'Fiction may elicit more intense emotions and imagery in addition to new facts and ideas from reading non-fiction books,' said Dr. Zaldy Tan, a professor of neurology and medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 'But more than the type of book, the key here is sustainability, Tan said, adding: 'I recommend people challenge their minds by reading something new to them.' Alzheimer's disease is the sixth leading cause of death in the US with 6.9 million people living with the disease which is expected to double by 2050 Neuroscientists have suggested that remaining physically active and engaging in other activities like knitting, playing chess and puzzles and gardening could also prevent cognitive decline. 'Leisure activities including reading have been associated with lower risk of developing dementia in older adults,' Tan told DailyMail.com.

It's long been thought that getting on in years leads to a gradual decline in our brainpower. But a new study now suggests that key mental abilities including concentration and attention may actually get better with age. These key brain functions underpin critical cognitive aspects such as memory, self-control and decision making, and even navigation, math, language and reading. 'These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view ageing,' said Michael T. Ullman, a professor at Georgetown University and co-author of the study. 'People have widely assumed that attention and executive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions.

Intelligence, in simpler words, can be explained as the mental ability of reasoning, problem-solving, and learning. Intelligence comes with perception, attention, and planning. Humans are the only resource of intelligence on this planet and this is what makes us stand out from all the natural god-gifted resources on this planet. The human brain has the capability of making decisions, remembering things of the past, and calculating for the future. Artificial intelligence as the name itself suggests it is a man-made intelligent machine.

A new mind-reading device means people can silently type on their computer using nothing but thoughts - and it's accurate 90 per cent of the time. Instead of communicating with smart devices by saying'Ok Google' or'Hey Siri', the headset silently interprets what users are thinking, giving them'superpowers', researchers say. When people think about verbalising something, the brain sends signals to facial muscles - even if nothing is said aloud. The device has sensors that pick up seven key areas along the cheek, jaw and chin that can recognise words and can even talk back once it has processed them. Other companies, such as Elon Musk's Neuralink, are also developing'Matrix' style computer-brain interfaces to give people advanced mental abilities.

A stomach hormone that stimulates appetite seems to promote the growth of new brain cells and protect them from the effects of ageing – and may explain why some people say that fasting makes them feel mentally sharper. When ghrelin was first discovered, it became known as the hunger hormone. It is made by the stomach when it gets empty, and whenever we go a few hours without food its levels rise in our blood. But there is also evidence that ghrelin can enhance cognition. Animals that have reduced-calorie diets have better mental abilities, and ghrelin might be part of the reason why.

Simple mental tests may be able to identify people who are likely to reach the top of their sport. That's according to researchers who showed that elite athletes who play team sports aren't just stronger and faster than the rest of us – some of their cognitive skills are better, too. Young soccer players, competing at the top level in Sweden, performed better than the general population on tests of so-called "executive function". And the better their results, the more goals they scored. Executive function isn't a measure of intelligence – it describes unconscious mental abilities like our working memory, which is involved in manipulating transient information to help us make decisions, and attentional control, which is our ability to choose what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

The intelligent machine is an evil genie, escaped from its bottle. As for the sci-fi dramatization about robots taking over the world--not anytime soon ... robot motors use a lot of power, and can usually only last about 30 min to 2 hr before needing to be recharged! The story of evolution unfolds with increasing levels of abstraction. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. ELON MUSK, attributed, "Enthusiasts and Skeptics Debate Artificial Intelligence", Vanity Fair, Nov. 26, 2014 When developers of digital technologies design a program that requires you to interact with a computer as if it were a person, they ask you to accept in some corner of your brain that you might also be conceived of as a program.

When I was twelve years old, I was fascinated by psychic powers. It's a provocative notion, to be able to reach out and push things around, hear what other people are thinking, or tell the future, all just by using your mind. I read everything I could find about ESP, telekinesis, clairvoyance, precognition--the whole gamut of mental abilities that stretched beyond the ordinary. I was a big fan of comic books, where all the heroes were endowed with superpowers, but also of science-fiction and fantasy stories, not to mention straightforwardly "scientific" accounts of what purported to be evidence for human capabilities beyond the normal. I wanted to penetrate the mystery, figure out how this kind of thing could really work.

Agency - the capacity to plan and act - and experience - the capacity to sense and feel - are two critical aspects that determine whether people will perceive non-human entities, such as autonomous agents, to have a mind. There is evidence that the absence of either can reduce cooperation. We present an experiment that tests the necessity of both for cooperation with agents. In this experiment we manipulated people's perceptions about the cognitive and affective abilities of agents, when engaging in the ultimatum game. The results indicated that people offered more money to agents that were perceived to make decisions according to their intentions (high agency), rather than randomly (low agency). Additionally, the results showed that people offered more money to agents that expressed emotion (high experience), when compared to agents that did not (low experience). We discuss the implications of this agency-experience theoretical framework for the design of artificially intelligent decision makers.

This paper is a survey of a large number of informal definitions of ``intelligence'' that the authors have collected over the years. Naturally, compiling a complete list would be impossible as many definitions of intelligence are buried deep inside articles and books. Nevertheless, the 70-odd definitions presented here are, to the authors' knowledge, the largest and most well referenced collection there is.