Questions tagged [brain]
The primary component of the central nervous system, which, along with the spinal cord, controls the body of bilaterally symmetrical beings.
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Are the transitions between the different brain frequencies states easy to see on an EEG?
Are the transitions between the different brain frequencies states: Gamma to Beta, Beta to Alpha, Theta to Delta, etc. easy to distinguish on an EEG? How quickly can the brain transition between any ...
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Do neurons with dopamine inside only send signals to another neuron with dopamine?
A nerve cell with dopamine receptors gets an action potential and releases dopamine to other neurons. Does this nerve cell only release to cells with dopamine inside? Because what if a neuron has a ...
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Is there such a thing as transcranial magnetic inhibition? inhibit regions of the brain?
is there such a thing as transcranial magnetic inhibition?
There is an instrument capable of inhibiting regions of the brain as does transcranial magnetic stimulation, but in reverse.
By inhibiting, I ...
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Term for context based behavior?
Is there term in neuroscience that describes change in neuronal circuits depending on context: low sugar/fear/... => hormones => different pathways of behavior ...?
I know that is something from ...
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What percentage of the brain is memory | Storage of thoughts, episodes
I was reading the article, in which it is mentioned that human brain constitutes 2.5 petabytes of memory. This made me wonder how much of the brain is associated with memory itself. If we categorize ...
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Does too much screen time really damage your brain? [closed]
So I was looking on the internet for articles to whether computers really damage your brain and I found that half of them say the do and the other half say the don't. Personally I don't think it does ...
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How much oxygen does a brain consume?
I am not a biologist - my background is in quantitative sciences, and I am trying to answer a rather quantitative question:
How much oxygen does a brain consume?
This however raises many sub-questions ...
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How do the biophysics of how cerebrospinal fluid mechanically protects the brain work?
The two mechanisms I've seen mentioned are the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) acting as a hydraulic cushion or shock absorber, and how CSF creates a micro-gravity environment through buoyancy.
I have very ...
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Evolution: what were we doing for 100.000 years? [closed]
I'm not a biologist/anthropologist but there is a question that comes up again and again and which I couldn't find any deeper thought, even not a speculation. As far as I understand it, according to ...
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What exactly is “lateral septum”?
I came across the phrase lateral septum and I can't seem to find the precise definition online. Is it "the areas roughly to the right and the left of the septum pellucidum"? Or is it the ...
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What are “intrinsic hypothalamic fibers”? (From an article on neuronal mechanisms of sexual desire)
I came across the phrase intrinsic hypothalamic fibers which I cannot understand. What is meant by intrinsic - that these fibers (long myelinated axons?) start in the hypothalamus? Or that they start ...
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Why do we get tunnel vision during fight or flight response?
I have a question regarding tunnel vision during the fight or flight response. I believe that during fight or flight high levels of adrenaline are released which causes the pupils to dilate allowing ...
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Why do we have both on and off bipolar cells?
I have a question regarding the reason behind the 2 bipolar cells.
So, from my understanding we have both on and off bipolar cells and from the numerous diagrams I have seen, I find that most show a ...
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When assessing a threat, does the amygdala compare the stimulus to memories of the amygdala or the hippocampus?
Two excerpts from the one article.
My understanding of this excerpt is that the amygdala is using its own memories:
The amygdala learns how to respond to various stimuli based on it’s reference to ...
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Can the eye determine which type of defocus is presented to it?
I have a question regarding myopic and hyperopic defocus.
My question is, is the eye able to determine which type of defocus is presented to it and if so what mechanisms allow it to distinguish ...
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How do we know that selective agonists are indeed selective?
Suppose we know that compound X is a selective agonist of receptor Y, meaning that it binds only this receptor Y and no other. But how do we know this that it doesn't bind some another receptor? I ...
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Can the human eye axial length decrease?
I just have a quick question regarding the axial length of the eyeball.
I understand that the axial length of the eyeball grows up until your around 20 years of age which is why hypermetropia ...
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If the Brain can store as much information as a billion hard disks why cant i memorize a single word document of random letters?
I read a lot of articles on this and all seem to agree that the brain storage in neural connections is tremendous but that doesnt explain why we forget things so easily and have such a modest memory ...
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Is Brain Eye connections reversed in all animals or just Humans?
I know that Brain Eye connections are reversed in Humans,
Left Hemisphere controls the Right eye/Right side of the body
Right Hemisphere Controls the Left eye/Left side of the body
Is it true in ...
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30 views
Alzheimer's disease - Hyperexcitability
I am trying to read literature on Alzheimer's disease.
A very important phenomenon that occurs in AD patients, is hyperexcitability in neurons close to A-beta concentrations.
Some authors only ...
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1answer
45 views
What is the significance of the amplitude of brain waves?
What does the amplitude of brain waves represent and to what neuronal activities is this amplitude related to?
For example, in a hypothetical situation, the frequency of brain waves is kept the same, ...
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Would it be possible to determine the strength of each neural connection in a connectome data set?
I understand that a connectome is a map of connections between neurons.
Would it be possible with current day technology to create a more detailed map that gives not only the connections themselves ...
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29 views
How can the material brain tell the material brain which memory it wants the material brain to recall?
I was looking around the internet for any scientific research that shows the material brain can operate the material brain and I couldn't find any. It seems like consciousness and self awareness ...
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What is a neuronal loop?
Stanford Medicine's OCD page says that
Many investigators have contributed to the hypothesis that OCD involves dysfunction in a neuronal loop running from the orbital frontal cortex to the ...
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58 views
Why isn't hearing the same as tasting? How do we feel and differentiate external stimuli?
When I was at school, I learned that:
Skin, tongue, ears, and other sensory organs have sensors/convertors that turn external environment stimuli into "electric" signals.
Neurons send information as ...
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52 views
Why doesn't the spinal cord get thicker the further up we go?
The cervical and lumbar enlargements exist on the spinal cord as a result of the increased nerve input/output required for the arms and legs respectively.
However, I don't understand how the ...
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Schematic of neural lineage tree and position of Choroid Plexus cells
I am trying to understand which are the different type of progenitors in the human brain and I am currently following this schematic.
My question is, are Choroid Plexus cells progenitors to Radial ...
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Breakdown of functional human genome by organ/What fraction of the functional human genome is devoted specifically to brain functioning?
Of course, there won't be a precise known answer to the question, as it is not even known precisely what percentage of the genome is functional in the first place - but I am still looking for research....
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Why does it take so long for the human brain to develop from an evolutionary point of view?
I have read that it takes about 25 years for the brain to be fully developed.
Coincidentally, humans from the Neolithic and Bronze Age had a very short life expectancy, in fact most of their life ...
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How does high-intensity aerobic exercise affect the brain?
I have been reading articles claiming that serotonin, endorphins and BDNF are produced during exercise, but they never mention the intensity or duration of exercise for this to happen.
To not make ...
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Has anyone attempted to add extra senses to a creature through a BCI/Neural interface?
Basic BCI's (Brain computer interfaces) have been available for quite a while now and allow users to preform rudimentary tasks such as moving prosthetic limbs with force-feedback or moving a mouse on ...
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1answer
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What does microglia process length tell us?
I'm reading a study investigating traumatic brain injury and alcohol consumption and the researchers measured microglia process length as an indicator of brain damage. I was wondering what that would ...
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Are there “old” neuron types in the neocortex?
"Old" may mean a neuron type that appeared early in the tree of life, and it may mean – going together – that it comes early in the lineage tree of neuronal cells, rooted in the fertilized ...
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Inhibitory functional connectivity
Functional connectivity may be defined as
»the temporal correlation between spatially remote neurophysiological events, expressed as deviation from statistical independence across these events in ...
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Are there nuclei with “real” interneurons?
In Kandel's "Principles of Neural Sciences" in the chapter about the anatomical organization of the brain one reads (p. 323, 4th ed.):
»Although a variety of [relay] neurons are involved at each ...
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How sharp are the borders between Brodmann areas?
How does the border between two Brodmann areas look like in Nissl stains? How large is the transition zone where one cannot tell to which of the two areas a neuron belongs to? How many neurons are ...
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Two-dimensional anatomical maps of the brain
The three-dimensional anatomy of the brain is hard to comprehend visually. But the exact spatial relations between the parts of the brain and their shapes are (sometimes) not so important because ...
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Which parts of the cerebral cortex don't belong to the neocortex?
In the Wikipedia article on the cerebral cortex one reads:
»Most of the cerebral cortex consists of the six-layered neocortex.«
Accordingly, in the Wikipedia list of regions in the human brain, ...
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Is relative timing of signal transmission between neurons along axons and through synapses relevant in the brain?
A neuron may be part of a nerve connection between two endpoints, transferring a signal that is not very sensitive to variations in signal propagation speed.
But a neuron inside a cluster of ...
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Umbrella term for “parts of the brain”
I am looking for an umbrella term for general "parts of the brain", esp. for (somehow arbitrary) "subsets of neurons".
For the tree of life there is an umbrella term for all kinds of taxonomic groups ...
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What does the thalamus consist of?
There is a long list of thalamic nuclei which are somehow embedded in the thalamus, a "large mass of gray matter located in the dorsal part of the diencephalon", according to Wikipedia.
I wonder what ...
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Functional roles of firing patterns
Eugene Izhikevich reports – e.g. here – a plethora of neural firing patterns:
My question is two-fold:
Is there an overview which types of neurons are capable of (and typically exhibit) ...
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Parts of the brain pivotal for maintaining consciousness
From an answer to another question (on conscious experiences by coma patients) I have learned that
no conscious experiences, complex thoughts, or complex emotions can
occur when one is in coma (...
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1answer
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How does the dopamine spike from drugs compare quantitatively to pleasurable non-drug activities?
I did find this popular press article that quotes a researcher offering the following quantification: "in lab experiments done on animals, sex causes dopamine levels to jump from 100 to 200 units, and ...
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1answer
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To what extent does loss of neurons in the substantia nigra affect movement?
There is a substance known as MPTP that is capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier. Once it does so, it is metabolized into a toxin called MPP+, which then selectively destroys dopaminergic ...
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Can brain activity be restored after being stopped, assuming no cellular damage?
I was reading about cryonic preservation recently. In a separate place on the Internet, I've read that once brain activity stops and brain death occurs, the person is dead with no hope of recovery. ...
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Why didn't the human Cerebrum evolve to have granule cells like the Cerebellum does?
The Cerebellum is much smaller compared to the Cerebrum yet it contains more than half of the total neurons contained in the brain.
That's mainly due to the granule cells in the Cerebellum which ...
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Does the cranial dura consist of the periosteum? and if not, then is there a mistake in my textbook?
My textbook (Neuroanatomy an illustrated colour text) states that:
The spinal dura and much of the cranial dura are separate from the periosteum, which forms the inner lining of the surrounding ...
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Janina kolkiewicz who faced Lazarus phenomenon
I've just read about Janina kolkiewicz case who faced Lazarus phenomenon and I was wondering how could her brain and organs survive these long hours without oxygen?
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Gaba and Magnesium
I read read that magnesium divalent ion binds to gaba receptors and induces the same effects as if gaba has binded. Does anyone know what happens to the gaba that would have been synthesised and ...
