Word: pattern
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...threat of terrorism and extremism has not yet been eliminated," Nikolai Patrushev, Director of Russia's FSB (the KGB's heir), commented to Interfax wire agency. He has ordered his service to strengthen its control of Russia's sensitive installations. Patrushev said the train bomb was part of a pattern of violence that also included a spate of attacks on security forces and officials in the North Caucasus region around Chechnya...
...Running a local government is not rocket science,” Werker said, “so the question becomes how to shake up the system enough to get competent leaders governing in the interest of the population. When no individual can break this pattern, it seems you want to start thinking outside...
McHugh's senior colleague Susumu Tonegawa, a Nobel laureate for his work on the genetics of immunity, had uncovered a related mechanism, called pattern completion, several years ago. That enables you to retrieve complete memories based on just a single cue--for example, the question "Did we go to school together?" He and McHugh suspected, based on this earlier work, that they could identify the specific gene that regulated pattern separation...
...also this circuit, the scientists are convinced, that explains dj vu. Every so often, they believe, the pattern-separation circuit misfires, and a new experience that's merely similar to an older one seems identical. "It doesn't happen very often to most people," Tonegawa says. Intriguingly, some people with epilepsy have this experience all the time. "Epileptic seizures involve random firing of neurons in the temporal lobes, which include the hippocampus," he says, and that could scramble the circuit...
...work will lead to a drug or therapy--not yet. And if it does, nobody is likely to focus on dj vu, a mere side effect of memory. But a fuller understanding of how the hippocampus works could lead to the creation of a drug that strengthens the pattern-recognition circuit, which could help people overcome fearful memories that are triggered by associations with a familiar-seeming place (like a dentist's office). Of course, if you strengthen the circuitry too much, you might get the opposite illusion: jamais vu, in which you get the eerie feeling that...