Word: hyden
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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...
...marvelous to be made up of mere matter. Yet it obviously consists of some arrangement of molecules in the brain that work collectively to remember and reason. Last week in San Francisco, a score of the world's most eminent scientists of the mind heard Swedish Neurobiologist Holger Hyden (pronounced he-dam), 43, offer a theory about the chemistry of thought. Hyden, who is chief of tissue studies at the University of Goteborg, even named a chemical that dictators might use to disrupt the thought process and enslave the minds of their subjects...
...brain, explained Professor Hyden, contains two main types of cells: neurons and glial cells. The neurons are giant, as cells go, with elaborate systems of filaments connecting them to other neurons. The smaller glial (meaning gluey) cells stick to the neurons like caviar on a canape. Hyden and his colleagues at Goteborg, by exquisitely delicate techniques, have separated neurons from their adherent glial cells and have weighed them in units as small as millionths of a millionth of a gram. By taking fresh, still-living cells from a rabbit's brain, the Hyden team has been able to find...
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...