This study tests previously untested extremes of the power of James Bond movies: “Functional Connectivity of the Macaque Brain across Stimulus and Arousal States,” Sebastian Moeller, Nambi Nallasamy, Doris Y. Tsao, and Winrich A. Freiwald, Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 18, May 6, 2009, pp. 5897-5909. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to […]
Tag: brain
A metaphor for fMRI studies of thought?
A new study contains a poetical phrase that maybe, just maybe, is a metaphor for the severe difficulty and beauty of a great scientific quest: learning how the heck the brain manages to think. Many brain scientists use a complex technology called “fMRI” (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) to make rough pictures of activity (many sorts of […]
Extraocular Phototransduction: more than meets the eye? (part 2)
We recently drew attention to the 1998 discovery at Cornell regarding the possibility of tweaking one’s cicadian rhythms by shining a bright light at the back of one’s knees. But continuing research into extraocular (outside the eye) light stimuli has turned to the possibility of a more direct route. Why not shine a light directly […]
Following in the wingbeats of the Star Wars locusts…
Newly reported research with dragonflies follows, at least in spirit, in the wingbeats of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning locust/Star Wars research. Greg Miller reports on the new work, in Wired: Scientists Put Backpacks on Dragonflies to Track Their Brains in Flight The brain of a dragonfly has to do some serious calculations — and fast […]