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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Do the foldings in the brain vary person to person?
Can the gyri and sulcus, which are the foldings of the cerebrum, vary from person to person? If that is true, then can we say different people have different types of thinking skills? I believed that ...
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Are electrons present in nerve cells during impulse conduction? [closed]
As the current flows when an electrical impulse is conducted from one end to another so what factor is responsible for production of current ? I think these are the electrons but my biology teacher ...
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Caffeine tolerance
I researched about caffeine tolerance and found out that regular consumption of coffe can build caffeine tolerance even if it's 1 cup per day, within few days or a week at most. Supposedly the body ...
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What is the most accurate polygenic score for Alzheimer’s disease?
To date, which polygenic score (i.e. which study) has produced the largest effect size for Alzheimer’s prediction in out-of-sample validation?
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Can a neuron produce electric or magnetic effect?
According to my view,As a neuron is an electrical impulse generating cell and through this impulse it carries information from brain to whole body or vice-versa, As here a very small electricity is ...
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Can Neurons be connected in Series and will that pattern create huge voltage in human body?
We have learned in Physics that when multiple voltage sources are connected in Series , the resultant voltage becomes the summation of all voltages .
Now, my question is - Can Neurons be connected in ...
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Could an animal have a developed Broca's area but no Wernicke's area?
Broca's area's function is for speech production, specifically, the control of muscular movement for speech, and Wernicke's area's function is the comprehend language or communication, Communication ...
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What is the extent of the CSF system out of the brain?
Does it spread sideways from the spinal cord at all?
How far down does it go?
I've found a lot of information about the spinal cord itself but not about the central canal, and more specifically if it'...
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Is there such thing as "being aware of itself" at a cellular level, or is awareness only a multicellular thing?
It appears to me after a brief thought, that you need multiple cells to send and coordinate messages in order to have "self awareness". Basically, you need some sort of centralized brain it ...
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Is there any research on episodic-like memory in reptiles?
I've been studying the area of episodic-like memory in non-human animals and our old reptile cousins seem to be really underrepresented (or not represented at all). Is there any research that I am ...
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50-400 bps consciousness: why do we draw the line there?
I have found studies that suggest the human consciousness can process 50 to 400 bps. The exact number varies, but it's always quite small. It is usually associated with some test results, but how do ...
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Does binge watching cause sleep problems?
According to a study from 2017, binge watching is correlated with various sleep problems:
The people who reported binge-watching were 98 percent more likely to report poor sleep quality compared with ...
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Why does Sanjay Gupta's brain look so unusual? (brain model shown on CNN) The subdivisions don't look like the lobes I learned in school
above: Screenshot from CNN's May 18, 2023 Feinstein’s office confirms broader health complications, contradicting senator’s denial below: from anatomyinfo.com's Parts of the Brain
Neurosurgeon Dr. ...
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How does brain activity change when focusing on something within peripheral vision, as opposed to the fovea?
Normally when looking around, we mentally focus on what we see within our fovea, as that is where we have the greatest visual acuity. However, it is still possible to focus (both physically with the ...
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Is there a quantitative report for cortical homunculus?
Almost all websites that I see for cortical homunculus only show the final picture with some qualitative descriptions such as "hands have more dexterity and occupy more motor cortex."
But is ...
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Happiness from sunlight is from IR or UV?
I found this study that shows that UV light makes our skin release feel-good endorphins. This is the pop-sci writeup.
On the other hand, it seems like IR is what causes the sense of warmth in the skin ...
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Has the approach of any protein digesting enzyme has been trialled for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy against a protein accumulation in brain cells?
PSP -the degenerative disorder is attributed to accumulation of a protein in brain cells. Has any work been done to approach it by digesting this protein?
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What is the evidence for cognition being mainly confined to the brain?
We believe that the processes of cognition are mainly confined to the brain.
What is the evidence for that?
I understand that the brain shows increased oxygen saturation in fMRI scans while thinking ...
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Are afterimages centrally regulated?
As I understand, negative afterimages might be induced by retinal cone bleaching or neuronal adaptation. I have heard that some experiments have suggested that afterimages can be centrally regulated. ...
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Research surrounding visualisation (inner eye)
Aphantasia is the suggested name for a condition where one does not
possess a functioning mind's eye and cannot visualize imagery.
I have self-diagnosed aphantasia, so I might be asking a question ...
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Equilibrium of the creation and destruction of memories in the brain?
Can the human brain be in a state, in which its memory capacity is maxed out and where for every new information an old one is "deleted" or "forgotten"? Assuming a constant stream ...
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What is the share of body energy that the brain consumes? Is 20% reliable?
"20% of the energy at only 2% of the weight" is a frequently regurgitated factoid. More precisely, it should read: 20% of oxygen consumption.
The problem starts when one looks into the ...
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Are there internal systems of organisms which acquired the functions which they were not evolved to perform?
In his research on the issue of belief formation Daniel Gilbert (1991. How Mental Systems Believe) claimed that cognition "is an evolutionary outgrowth of [perception]." What he meant is ...
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When does a fetus become conscious?
I thought of asking this question in the Psychology & Neuroscience stack exchange, but I ultimately decided this would be a better stack exchange for it. When do the "lights turn on" in ...
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Unbounded synaptic weight in Hebb’s rule
I am new to neuroscience and apologies in advance if this is a very trivial question. I want to model the synaptic weights of neurons and using the discrete Hebb’s update rule
$$w_{n+1}=w_n(1+c)$$
...
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Scientific terms for front-brain, mid-brain and back-brain
I am looking for a (semi-) scientific way of phrasing "front part of brain" (part 1), "middle part of brain" (part 2) and "back part of brain" (part 3) as denoted in the ...
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How does the central nervous system create the feeling of physical sensation in our consciousness? [closed]
I know sensory neurons that respond to light and physical sensations (pressure, temperature) exist throughout our body, giving us information about our surroundings.
For instance, when I push the tip ...
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Does beta-actin have to be consistent in Western Blots?
I have been running Western Blots on rat brain tissues from rats that have been subject to neurological disorders.
I loaded the samples on the gel to ensure that for each tissue, I had a constant mass ...
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How does the female body sense its own pregnancy?
I understand that after the fertilized ovum attached in the uterus the female body will not produce the required hormone surge for ovulation the next month. Therefore no new ovum will be sent down the ...
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Abnormally fast nerve conduction
Is there any neurological condition or disease where nerve conduction becomes abnormally fast?
We know that myelinated neurons conduct impulses much more rapidly than non-myelinated ones as the myelin ...
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Does any brain-computer interface model draw on neural temporal codes?
I am studying brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and neural encoding/decoding for a class. Most decoding algorithms that I have encountered for BCIs tackling movement problems seem to assume a neural ...
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How widespread among mammals is the glymphatic system's metabolite clearance in the brain during sleep currently known to be?
The glymphatic system and "brain washing" (metabolite clearance) during mammalian sleep:
Xie et al. (2013) Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain (also here) has been cited ...
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How is brain calorie intake affected after hemispherectomy?
So, I hear brain consumes 20% of the body's energy, and also according to studies people with only one hemisphere can function mentally fine with little to no problems.
My question is, how does that ...
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How to measure tone of the cerebral cortex?
There is a lot of information about the "tone of the cerebral cortex". Some scientific papers describe that the tone could decrease or increase. However it's not clear how do they measure ...
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What is the size of different mouse brain cells? [closed]
I am trying to isolate microglia from the adult mouse brain. I wondered if I would get pure microglia culture if, after homogenization, I filtered cell suspension through a 70um filter. But I could ...
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In evolutionary history, which came first - neuron or astrocyte?
As research is showing astrocytes role in information processing [1], I am interested in knowing which evolved first - an astrocye or a neuron ?
[1] Santello, M., Toni, N. & Volterra, A. Astrocyte ...
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There are some species that grow throughout their lives -- is there evidence that even in adulthood their brains increase in size?
One species I have read about is carp whose growth is limited only by food supply and space. One can actually, because their skin is almost transparent, see their brains and it sure does look like ...
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Newts in a rodent larder. Limits of regeneration? (NSFSqueamish)
Observation.
In the Surrey woodland of southern UK mainland I chanced upon a piece of corrugated metal. Lifting it up I found a bare patch of soil except for what appeared to be a nest of dry plant ...
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Why do animals with more mass tend to have brains with so much more mass when it seems like a similar mass brain should be able to do the job?
Why does a wolf have a brain so much bigger than that of a poodle, when a poodle's brain is big enough to do the job, I would have thought. Likewise, if tigers are not smarter than house cats, why do ...
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How many signals can one neuron send and/or receive simultaneously?
I've been researching this question online and finding opposing answers. Some articles say that one neuron can only send one signal at a time while others says that one neuron can send more than one ...
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Is human skull size related to brain size?
Me and my dad have a disagreement about this. He thinks that if a person had a larger skull they would naturally have a larger brain. I think that he is assuming the evolutionary trend holds on an ...
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What structures does our brain use for a quick indexing of all the data we store in our heads?
What structures does our brain use for a quick indexing of all the data we store in our heads?
From how my brains work (i.e. that I can very quickly recollect something from the past) I would say that ...
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Intelligence of nervous system vs other human intelligence? [closed]
Viral proteins are shown to be used in intelligence such as for memory: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180111141450.htm
I wondered since proteins able to form prions are the most ...
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Why do colors clash in your brain?
Wen pairing two or more colors together, some "clash" or cause a effect visually where the two colors meet. To me it appears to be a black line between the colors or shading when in fact ...
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Is the central sulcus the boundary between basal and alar derivatives?
The dorsal part of the nervous system typically gives rise to sensory structures, and the ventral part gives rise to motor structures. Because the central sulcus marks such a functional boundary, I ...
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Are there regularly spaced connections between caudate nucleus and putamen?
There are a number of images on the Web, most beautifully Visible Body's artwork, which show the caudate nucleus and putamen linked by regularly spaced connections across the barrier of the internal ...
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Why did the dinosaurs not have gigantic brains and become really smart? [duplicate]
All my life, I've heard that all these gigantic dinosaurs that used to live on Earth had peanut-sized brains. I just accepted this as a fact, and I guess it may be a fact.
But now I wonder: why?! If ...
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Is there a difference between human neuron cells compared to those of other animals?
Thanks for looking.
Firstly, I am nowhere near biologist, just a student, so my apologies if this isn't a "good" question.
Background:
So I was searching about intelligence, brains and ...
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Read neural activity only having access to the brain from the "outside"
Is it possible to read neural activity from the outside of the head and if you had an machine learning algorithm that could learn what the signals "mean" (for example moving the right arm)? ...
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How can animals that rely on SONAR not see color? [closed]
Humans can sense colors with acuity and can distinguish them because of the light of different spectrum that follows into their eyes. Not its also said that sound is different for different colors,
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