Word: cortexes
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...scientists could eavesdrop on the brain of a human embryo 10, maybe 12 weeks after conception, they would hear an astonishing racket. Inside the womb, long before light first strikes the retina of the eye or the earliest dreamy images flicker through the cortex, nerve cells in the developing brain crackle with purposeful activity. Like teenagers with telephones, cells in one neighborhood of the brain are calling friends in another, and these cells are calling their friends, and they keep calling one another over and over again, "almost," says neurobiologist Carla Shatz of the University of California, Berkeley...
Scientists are also beginning to identify some of the genes that guide neurons in their long migrations. Consider the problem faced by neurons destined to become part of the cerebral cortex. Because they arise relatively late in the development of the mammalian brain, billions of these cells must push and shove their way through dense colonies established by earlier migrants. "It's as if the entire population of the East Coast decided to move en masse to the West Coast," marvels Yale University neuroscientist Dr. Pasko Rakic, and marched through Cleveland, Chicago and Denver to get there...
...Prozac or cognitive therapy can actually restore normal function in the obsessive-compulsive brain. The scans have documented that ocd patients have abnormal activity in the head of the caudate nucleus, a part of the brain's deep-dwelling basal ganglia, coupled with unusual activity in the orbital prefrontal cortex, just above the eye sockets. The caudate nucleus normally acts as a gatekeeper, determining which thoughts, feelings and behaviors take priority. When it malfunctions, the "worry inputs" generated in the orbital prefrontal region run unchecked, and irrational beliefs become rigid and intractable...
...second was the discovery of spatial organization in specific parts of the brain. At the surface of the brain, called the cortex, sheets of tissue preserve images from the retina of the eye in patterns of activity in neural cells...
...hiker on a mountain path, for example, sees a long, curved shape in the grass out of the corner of his eye. He leaps out of the way before he realizes it is only a stick that looks like a snake. Then he calms down; his cortex gets the message a few milliseconds after his amygdala and "regulates" its primitive response...