Word: cortexes
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...useful data, but only the ones relating to math and ethics produced results clear enough to give a vivid picture of the way the simple and the complex, the subjective and the objective intertwine. Regardless of their content, statements that the subjects believed lit up the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), a location in the brain best known for processing reward, emotion and taste. Equally "primitive" areas associated with taste, pain perception and disgust determined disbelief. "False propositions may actually disgust us," Harris writes...
Neuroscientists have known for a while that kids' brains are programmed to do the wave. The cortex, or outer layer of gray matter--which is responsible for such things as planning movement and suppressing inappropriate thoughts or actions--thickens from back to front during childhood and then thins out in adolescence, as unused neural connections go the way of football fans' empty beer cups. Thanks to nifty imaging techniques, the point at which the cortex reaches peak thickness is now recognized as an early milestone in brain maturation. But in a surprising new study, kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder...
...that allowed researchers to "watch" some 40,000 points in the subjects' brains over time, and to figure out which specific regions of the brain developed, or thickened, at different rates. On average, in children with ADHD, the age at which 50% of the 40,000 points on the cortex - the brain's outer mantle - achieved peak thickness was 10 1/2, three years behind the typically developing kids whose cortex matured at age 7 1/2. The lag was most obvious in the prefrontal cortex, the study found, the area of the brain critical to cognitive functions like memory, attention focusing...
...therapeutic science of deep-brain stimulation (DBS). Doctors at the Cleveland Clinic inserted a pair of fine wires into the mugging victim's brain last year, threading them down to the thalamus, a deep, intact structure that could, in theory, jump- start the surviving circuits in the damaged cerebral cortex above. Very low current was sent through the wires, stimulating the thalamus, which indeed awakened the higher brain...
...better able than ever to locate the physical roots of these bizarre perceptions of self. For example, neurologists have studied amputees who can feel sensation where their missing limbs used to be; researchers think this phantom limb phenomenon has to do with rewiring in the brain's somatosensory cortex. And, in the lab, researchers have been able to make people feel that fake rubber hands are attached to their own bodies. (This was done simply enough, by touching the participants' real hands while having them watch the rubber hands be touched in the same way and the same time...