Word: neurobiologists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...University of Southern California, has found that the brains of people with ASP look different from those of the rest of the population, with less gray matter in the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that regulates behavior and social judgment. Just last month University of Iowa neurobiologist Antonio Damasio reported findings from a study showing that early brain injuries affect the long-term ability to distinguish between right and wrong...
What if it turned out that by enhancing intellectual ability, some other personality trait changed as well? "Everything comes at a price," argues UCLA neurobiologist Alcino Silva. "Very often when there's a genetic change where we improve something, something else gets hit by it, so it's never a clean thing." The alarmists, like longtime biotech critic Jeremy Rifkin, go further. "How do you know you're not going to create a mental monster?" he asks. "We may be on the road to programming our own extinction...
...what they didn't know until the late 1980s is that these nerves are more than just glorified gatekeepers. They actually "remember" the body's past travails, causing permanent changes that are recorded in their molecular structure. "Think of the spinal cord as a voice-mail system," says neurobiologist Allan Basbaum of the University of California, San Francisco. "A message comes in and leaves something behind." The longer the injury persists, the more sensitive the spinal nerves become to painful stimuli--and the more intensely they signal the brain that something is wrong...
...time, I was a neurobiologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego. I was deeply immersed in questions of brain organization and development. And I was gay. So it wasn't a big stretch to put these two parts of my life together: to ask whether this particular aspect of human diversity, so central to my own sense of identity and my place in society, could be understood in terms of neurons, synapses and genes...
...distinctive three-note quail song. After much trial and error, Balaban--an amateur baroque musician who sometimes serenaded his chicks with his lute to stimulate their singing--traced the movements and sounds to two very different areas in the brain. "That's new. That's interesting," says Caltech neurobiologist Masakazu Konishi. "It means posture and sound that usually occur together in crowing are controlled by different neuromechanisms...