There’s a reason surgeons wear masks and gloves. The last thing you want is to get crap in someone’s body. That is, unless you are one of the two UC Davis Medical Center neurosurgeons who very purposely introduced their patents’ brains to poop bacteria. It was a real shit-for-brains way of trying to help.
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The idea has been tossed around in science fiction yarns for years now, but researchers at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands have actually found a way to read people’s minds. Or, more specifically, decode what letters of the alphabet a subject is looking at by analyzing MRI scans with a special mathematical model they developed. Freaky.
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The pinwheel-like drawing above is nothing but black and white lines. When you look at it the right way, though, something strange and beautiful happens: it begins to flicker. You may think it’s just a regular old optical illusion at first, but actually, you’re looking at your very own brain waves.
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Locked-in syndrome, where a person with a fully functioning brain is trapped in a completely paralyzed body, is one of neurology’s most vexing (and terrifying) problems. Physicians and researchers have struggled for years to establish an objective way to determine level of consciousness that doesn’t require patients to express themselves through some form of muscle movement. New research could hold the solution, with a technique that directly quantifies brain activity by measuring the its response to a magnetic coil.
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We now know slightly more about what happens after death, thanks to new research that measures the electrical activity in the brains of rats before and after cardiac arrest. Spoiler: it does not flat-line. Not immediately, anyway.
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You’ve undoubtedly heard over and over again about what an absurdly complex entity the human brain is. But a new breakthrough by Japanese and German scientists might finally drive the point home. Taking advantage of the almost 83,000 processors of one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers
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The movie Inception is getting closer to reality. By planting false memories into the minds of mice, neuroscientists at MIT have created the first artificially implanted memories. And they’ve brought us closer to understanding the fallibility of human recollection.
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A team of scientists in Switzerland has managed to cram 11,011 electrodes onto a single two-millimeter-by-two-millimeter piece of silicon to create a microchip that works just like an actual brain. The best part about this so-called neuromorphic chips? They can feel.
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There’s something undeniably surreal about early cave paintings, something otherworldly or even psychedelic. And according to a team of international scientists, that’s because the cave painters were doing mind-bending drugs while painting them.
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The human brain is an insanely complex organic computer, and though it still has plenty of secrets, we’re now a little bit closer to figuring it all out. Building on a decade of research, an international team of neuroscientists have just put the final touches on the most sophisticated 3D map of the human brain that the world has ever seen.
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