November 2, 2007 – 12:24 am
From EurekAlert.
Brain scientists at Johns Hopkins have discovered how cells in the developing ear make their own noise, long before the ear is able to detect sound around them. The finding, reported in this week’s Nature, helps to explain how the developing auditory system generates brain activity in the absence of sound. It also may [...]
August 20, 2007 – 12:20 am
From Discover Magazine.
How is information coded in neural activity?
It is likely that mental information is stored not in single cells but in populations of cells and patterns of their activity. Although traveling bursts of voltage can carry signals across the brain quickly, those electrical spikes may not be the only—or even the main—way that information [...]
Taken from Dalai Lama’s book The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.
One of the most important philosophical insights in Buddhism comes from what is known as the theory of emptiness. At its heart is the deep recognition that there is a fundamental disparity between the way we perceive the world, [...]
The original article at Popsci.com.
Ted Berger has spent the past decade engineering a brain implant that can re-create thoughts. The chip could remedy everything from Alzheimer’s to absent-mindedness—and reduce memory loss to nothing more than a computer glitch.
The chip’s ability to converse with live cells is a dramatic first step, he believes, toward an implantable [...]