Word: cortex
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...comes the most startling discovery yet. According to a recent report in Science, researchers have found discrete locations in the brain of an intricate system that serves, among other things, as the human moral compass. Largely in the prefrontal cortex, it is where reason is applied to complex social situations, where our personal scales of justice do their weighing. It may come as a shock that this highest, most spiritual faculty is just as identifiable and in some ways as physically vulnerable as, say, a knee joint. But vulnerable it is. One's moral fiber can literally snap...
...model, tested by computer simulation, is a means by which to simplify the complex neurobiological functions of the visual cortex and to make qualitative predictions about how cells respond to stimuli...
Kosslyn discussed the process by which the brain calls up images, in particular how reexamination of a visual scene actually activates the visual cortex, the region of the brain which processes visual input...
...Crammed into the skull of every human individual are as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way. Each one of these receives input from about 10,000 other neurons in the brain and sends messages to a thousand more. The combinatorial possibilities are staggering. The cerebral cortex alone boasts 1 million billion connections, a number so large, marvels neuroscientist Gerald Edelman in his recent book about the brain, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, that "if you were to count them, one connection per second, you would finish counting some 32 million years after you began...
Normally, the caudate nucleus filters the flood of anxious feelings and sensations that are relayed from the orbital cortex, an area of the brain just above the eyes, and sends only the significant ones on to the thalamus for further action. But in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, says neuroscientist Lewis Baxter, who led the team, the caudate nucleus is "a poor executive officer. He's bombarded with messages from worrywarts. But instead of setting priorities, he gets excited about all the messages and passes them on to the dispatcher...