Word: hyden
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Spinning Rabbits. The neuron's basic function is to transmit "nerve impulses" by high-speed electrochemical reactions. Hyden's team devised an ingenious way to find out what happens to nerve cells when they receive a stimulus. The scientists spun rabbits on a centrifuge, just fast enough to make them dizzy and cause the cells in the acoustic nerve and the vestibular apparatus of the inner ear (a center of balance) to stimulate the brain with a sense of distress. Then they painlessly killed the animals and analyzed the nerve cells...
...neurons' content of enzyme proteins, while the glial cells showed a corresponding drop. The glial cells behave like the self-sacrificing wife who eats mostly potatoes and gives the high-energy meat to her ditchdigger husband. The "information" contained in the protein which the neuron forms, reasons Hyden, becomes the impulse that the neuron sends along the filaments to other neighboring neurons...
Modified Proteins. The higher brain functions of memory and reasoning, Hyden hypothesizes, are achieved by the way the neuron alters the protein it forms. Each neuron contains millions of molecules of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Each of these molecules is chemically keyed by the arrangement of its internal building blocks. These molecules dictate, in accordance with their keys, the nature of the proteins that the neuron forms, in cooperation with the glial cells. The modified proteins are the chemical representations of thoughts...
...from cell to cell until it finds those containing RNA molecules already keyed to respond to that note, and it is this chemical response that constitutes recognition of the note. The average human brain has ten billion neurons, so the number of possible permutations is astronomical. Further, said Dr. Hyden, this theory explains why neurologists have been unable to find precise centers in the brain for most higher mental functions: through its content of many imprinted molecules, each neuron may participate simultaneously in many neuronal networks-and therefore in many memories and complex thoughts...
Brainwasher on Tap. The next thing was to learn whether mental function can be chemically controlled. It can, said Dr. Hyden. Small doses of a new synthetic substance called tricyano-amino-propene ("triap") caused drastic changes in neuronal RNA and proteins in animals-and, according to preliminary studies...