October 2011
4 posts
Holy crap, it moved!
We don’t usually think about our cells moving, at least not of their own accord. WE move, not our cells, right? My leg moves because I tell it to, and my diaphragm contracts, drawing air into my lungs, because my brainstem tells it to—it doesn’t just contract on its own.
But some of our cells DO move. I’m talking, here, (I’ll bet you guessed it) about neurons.
In...
Synesthesia part 2: how we think it might occur in...
To recap: Synesthesia = pretty cool. Things that most of us experience in a single modality (e.g. aurally), synesthetes (people who have synesthesia) experience in one or more additional modality. For example, on hearing a particular tone, a synesthete might also see a color. There are many different types of synesthesia. Awesome, right?
Note that synesthesia is automatic and involuntary, and it...
Aren't you at least a little jealous of...
This week, ladies and gentlemen, I will be discussing synesthesia. Synesthesia comes from the Greek for “together sensation”, and it refers to the neurological condition in which the activation of one sensory (or cognitive) pathway causes a person to automatically and involuntarily experience a second sensation.
Estimates vary, but there seems to be a rough consensus in the literature...
Oh dear, the filopodia are penetrating the...
According to Dr. David Eagleman, an author and neuroscientist who visited campus last week, the human brain has about 10,000,000,000 neurons, and on average, each neuron has around 10,000 connections to other neurons. And 10,000,000,000 neurons multiplied by 10,000 connections per neuron is roughly 10^14 connections in the human brain. Which is to say, the human brain is an incredibly complex...
