Word: neural
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...After a period of sleep, the volume of connections between nerve cells in the brain decreased, a condition that Tononi theorizes offsets the wakeful brain's activity. During waking hours, the brain keeps adding new information about its environment, forming new circuits and new connections in an ever thickening neural network. But even the fruit-fly brain has its limits and, like any computer, needs a fail-safe shutdown mode as it gets close to overload. That's where sleep comes in. (See pictures of how animals sleep...
...impact of anesthesia on still developing minds and bodies. The hazards were documented in earlier studies of animals: for example, rat studies have repeatedly shown that animals exposed to anesthesia drugs in the first seven days of life - when nerve cells are forming and connecting to the larger neural network - develop problems performing maze exercises, which require memory and reasoning skills. In the 1960s, based on similar concerns over possible injury to a baby's immature nervous system, doctors advocated only light anesthesia or none at all for infants undergoing surgery. Some experts believed babies did not have sufficiently developed...
...You’d like us to tell you what this means for consciousness or for uncovering how diseases act in the brain, but we are far from that,” Sanes says. In the meantime, Sanes has a more modest goal: mapping only the neural passageways from the eyes to the brain, carefully matching up the colors on each slice to create a complete picture of the neurons, and ultimately, their functions.The researchers say they hope discovering how and why neurons change will help answer why human brains are truly different from those of other species?...
...lives of patients suffering from so-called locked-in syndrome might one day become a little less desolate. According to a small study just published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, a new technique may make it possible for people on the outside to communicate with these patients by, in effect, reading their minds. (See pictures of Asia's mental health centers...
Finally, says Rankin, the issue may be one of screening: because ultrasound monitoring of obese patients is much more difficult than the monitoring of thinner women, it could lead to more missed cases of deformities like neural-tube defects. "We know that it is much harder to get good visibility of the fetus in scanning women who are obese, and more babies may be born with spina bifida and other abnormalities in these women," says Rankin. (Read "The Year in Medicine 2008: From...