Word: neuroscientist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...idea for the eye test came from Huntington Potter, a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, who ingeniously followed up on an observation about people with Down syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes mental retardation. Potter knew that almost all Down patients who live long enough eventually develop brain lesions identical to those detected in autopsies of Alzheimer's sufferers. By scouring the scientific literature, he learned that people with Down syndrome are very sensitive to tropicamide, the drug used to dilate the pupil of the eye. Potter then approached Leonard Scinto, a neuroscientist now at Brigham and Women's Hospital...
...dyslexics after the subjects had died, comparing these suspect brains with normal ones. Generally, they found, the neurons (nerve cells) in the MGN are the same size in both the right and left hemisphere of the brain. But in the dyslexia cases, notes team member Glenn Rosen, a Harvard neuroscientist, "we found that the size of the neurons is smaller in the left hemisphere than it is in the right hemisphere." The size differential is only 10% to 15%, but that may be enough to throw off the brain's timing and disrupt its crucial word-processing skills...
...there are stars in the Milky Way. Each one of these receives input from about 10,000 other neurons in the brain and sends messages to a thousand more. The combinatorial possibilities are staggering. The cerebral cortex alone boasts 1 million billion connections, a number so large, marvels neuroscientist Gerald Edelman in his recent book about the brain, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire, that "if you were to count them, one connection per second, you would finish counting some 32 million years after you began...
Normally, the caudate nucleus filters the flood of anxious feelings and sensations that are relayed from the orbital cortex, an area of the brain just above the eyes, and sends only the significant ones on to the thalamus for further action. But in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, says neuroscientist Lewis Baxter, who led the team, the caudate nucleus is "a poor executive officer. He's bombarded with messages from worrywarts. But instead of setting priorities, he gets excited about all the messages and passes them on to the dispatcher...