Word: neuroscientists
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Indeed, the brain abhors a vacuum, observes neuroscientist Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego; it craves information, and when it can't come by the data honestly, it does the best it can with what it has. One of his patients, for instance, a physical-therapy professor from San Antonio, Texas, suffered a brain hemorrhage that left a huge blank spot in her otherwise normal field of vision-or, rather, it would be blank if her brain allowed it. First, she saw a drawing of a cat, presumably supplied by her visual memory. "Then," says...
...York University Medical School neuroscientist Dr. Rodolfo Llins also thinks coordinated electrical signals give rise to consciousness, though his idea is subtly different from Crick and Koch's. Llinas believes that the firing of neurons is not just simultaneous but also coordinated. Using a highly sensitive device called a magnetoencephalograph, which indirectly measures the electric currents within the brain, Llinas measured the electrical response to external stimuli (he used musical tones). What he observed was a series of perfectly timed oscillations. Says Llinas: "The electrical signal says that a whole lot of cells must be jumping up and down...
Llinas' and Crick and Koch's concepts, speculative though they may be, are at least firmly rooted in biology. But you don't have to be a biologist or a neuroscientist to play the consciousness game: the mystery is intriguing enough so that researchers from a wide variety of scientific disciplines have jumped in with their own ideas. Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose, for example, argues that consciousness may arise from quantum mechanics, of all things, the same process that governs the behavior of subatomic particles...
...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...