Tag: brain
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Organoids. Brain waves. Death…
Some years ago, two hundred and fifty miles over Alysson Muotri’s head, a thousand tiny spheres of brain cells were sailing through space. The clusters, called brain organoids, had been grown a few weeks earlier in the biologist’s lab here at the University of California, San Diego. He and his colleagues altered human skin cells…
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Hallucinations…
Hallucinations are spooky and, fortunately, fairly rare. But, a new study suggests, the real question isn’t so much why some people occasionally experience them. It’s why all of us aren’t hallucinating all the time. In the study, Stanford University School of Medicine neuroscientists stimulated nerve cells in the visual cortex of mice to induce an…
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Listening to music. Humans. Apes.
In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint…
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Dreamless dreams…
In a nighttime experiment called the Dream Catcher, people’s dreams slipped right through the net. Looking at only the brain wave activity of sleeping people, scientists weren’t able to reliably spot a dreaming brain. (1) Weird cosmos… No signs of dreams. And yet, we are dreaming. No signs of consciousness. And yet, I am me.…
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Learning. Remembering. Crying.
Scientists have revealed the structure of a critical receptor in the brain associated with learning, memory, behavior and mood. The new research is the first to reveal the structure of AMPA receptors in their natural state. This discovery could lead to new insight about the mechanism behind a wide range of nervous system disorders and…
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