Word: cortexes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...having an electrical connection," says Dr. George Wittenberg, a neurologist at Wake Forest University, who is studying magnetic pulses for their potential to help stroke patients recover more quickly. Unlike electroconvulsive therapy, which affects the whole brain, the magnets are focused only on specific regions at the surface, or cortex. And because the treatment does not trigger a seizure (as electroconvulsive therapy does), there's no need for muscle relaxants or anesthesia and no problem with memory loss. Patients undergoing magnetic stimulation usually feel only a kind of tapping on their skull as the current starts to flow...
Although researchers freely confess that they don't know how rTMS works, they do have some ideas. It has long been clear that neurons in different parts of the brain can act in concert. Of particular interest are the circuits that link the areas of the cortex that help us reason and plan our lives with more deeply embedded zones of the brain such as the limbic system, where emotions are processed. One theory holds that depression is either caused by or results in an imbalance in the activity in those regions. Applying periodic bursts of electrical current...
...technique, which generates high resolution pictures, has also revealed surprising precision of brain cell organization in the visual cortex of cats...
...method is a combination of several previously discovered techniques, including work done by Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel prize for their work. Their experiments revealed that different neurons in the visual cortex respond to different stimuli...
...colleagues have shown that the brain's ability to use glucose drops off dramatically after being awake 24 hours, indicating a decrease in brain activity--despite the fact that there's still plenty of glucose available. The biggest drops occur in exactly those areas of the cortex that anticipate and integrate emotion and reason. After 24 hours, however, the drop-off stabilizes. "But performance doesn't level off," Belenky notes. "It continues to tank." Why? No one knows...