| | We truly live in amazing times with regard to brain science. I love hearing about scientists probing and discovering how it is that the brain makes us aware of reality. This article explains how scientists have isolated about 100 neurons and watched them as they came alive during an experience and then came alive again on recall of the experience.
From the article:
In each person, the researchers identified single cells that became highly active during some videos and quiet during others. More than half the recorded cells hummed with activity in response to at least one film clip; many of them also responded weakly to others.
After briefly distracting the patients, the researchers then asked them to think about the clips for a minute and to report “what comes to mind.” The patients remembered almost all of the clips. And when they recalled a specific one — say, a clip of Homer Simpson — the same cells that had been active during the Homer clip reignited. In fact, the cells became active a second or two before people were conscious of the memory, which signaled to researchers the memory to come...
...Dr. Fried said in a phone interview that the single neurons recorded firing most furiously during the film clips were not acting on their own; they were, like all such cells, part of a circuit responding to the videos, including thousands, perhaps millions, of other cells.
Brain science is absolutely fascinating.
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Posted in the wrong section, sorry.
(Edited by Tim Scobey on 9/05, 1:13pm)
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