This is wild. Chasing the elusive dream of curing paralysis, a team of scientists used stem cells and optogenetics to circumvent the central motor system of lab mice whose nerves had been cut. This enabled them to blast individual motor neurons with a laser, triggering movement in the legs of the mice.
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Fantasizing about an old flame? Lusting over a celebrity instead of your current squeeze? Watch out: scientists can reconstruct the faces you’re thinking about from a brain scan alone.
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The folks at Dock Street Brewing Co. really love beer. They also apparently really love AMC’s The Walking Dead. Putting these two loves together was a no-brainer. Or wait. The exact opposite of that.
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Some people claim that they have experienced out-of-body experiences—aka "astral trips"—floating outside of their bodies and watching themselves from the outside. A team of scientists found someone who says she can do this at will and put her into a brain scanner. What they discovered was surprisingly strange.
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Badly, perhaps. But even if you struggle to recall information on a daily basis, all our brains are wired in much the same way—and it requires quite a few steps to remember anything at all.
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It’s funny watching dogs do human things. It’s funny to watch them drive cars
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Pain is a hard problem. Sure, we can throw a little morphine at pain in the short term, but researchers continue to struggle with solutions for chronic pain. New research from Stanford’s futuristic Bio-X lab looks like a light at the end of the tunnel—literally!
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Time is a slippery continuum. Watching the hands on a clock tick will feel way, way different depending on the situation; trying to frantically write something on deadline with five minutes to spare ain’t the same as desperately willing a conference call to finish more quickly. It turns out that music can have an equally brain-bending effect on how we process the days of our lives.
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If you look at the wires behind your entertainment console, you’re going to see different colors tangled up with different things leading to different places you forgot existed. It’s an awful ugly mess. Seeing the brain is like that, only the opposite because in its chaos is beauty. Just look at the 3D brain scan above that shows every synapse, it’s like a 3D Jackson Pollock painting.
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In an experiment straight out of a comic book, Virginia Tech scientists have found a way to improve sensory abilities. All it takes is a detailed map of the brain, an ultrasound gun, and a willing patient. What could go wrong?
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
