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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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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Can a novel stimulus be processed concurrent with a P3a ERP [migrated]
P3b is associated with the detection of novel stimuli unrelated to a task. It was initially confounded with P3a, which is associated with task related stimuli. They were originally thought to be the ...
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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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How do brains find the peak/valley point on a curve?
It costs O(n) time if we find the max/min value in a number sequence with the length n. However, if we convert this sequence into a curve and find the peak/valley point with our eyes, it will use much ...
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Is there an 'opposite' neurotransmitter to dopamine?
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter (i.e. chemical) in the brain that gives us great feeling. From here:
Dopamine plays a role in how we feel pleasure. It's a big part of our unique human ability to ...
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Why do women have less synapses / neurons / brain mass than men despite having the same average IQ?
I don't mean to cause offence or suggest than men and women shouldn't be of the same intelligence — that's not something I'm here to dispute. What I want to understand is how this is possible given ...
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Differences between comatosed states and brain death
What are the neurological, physical, etc. differences between someone who is in a coma (one that is not medically-induced) and someone who is colloquially deemed "brain dead" (being ...
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Brain centers vs areas (and how they relate to nuclei)
I'm looking for a reputable source that can provide succinct definitions differentiating the following terms in the central nervous system (CNS; particularly in the brain):
Area
Center
Nucleus
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How are thoughts biologicaly generated?
I want to know how thoughts are biologicaly generated. I know that electrical impulses can trigger formed memories in the brain but what I want to know is how the electrical impulse is generated in ...
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Can we decode memories?
Premise: I don't have a strong background in neuroscience or human biology, so I would ask you to answer like you would at a 5 years old child. I have done a couple of research on the web, as well as ...
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Why is gyrification advantageous?
Standard 'Explanation':
I've seen countless neuroscience articles and experts explain that 'cortical gyrification is advantageous because it increases surface area which obviously increases your ...
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Biological Neural Network Modification to Unlearn Understandings [closed]
Lets assume that a person grows up thinking that religion X is true religion. So he builds up a profile in ones head and when notion of religion X appears the neurons that is related are fired, giving ...
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Single cell organism's brain [closed]
Multi cellular organisms have brain.But what about single celled organisms do they have brain to control the cell's work?If they have something what that part called?You can say that the nucleolus do ...
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Biological Neural Network Training for Babies [closed]
I am concerned by the fact that babies cant walk because the muscles in their limbs arent developed and tuned to give directional control, it takes years before babies gain mobility and dexterity. So ...
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Difference between Processing and Preprocessing
In the wikipedia article of emotion lateralization it is mentioned:
The right hemisphere is important for processing primary emotions such as fear while the left hemisphere is important for ...
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Parts of Brain Active for Dreams | Right Hemisphere or Cortex
I found a research that states cortex is responsible for the contents of the dream. Contents could be people, place, objects etc.
The cortex is responsible for the content of dreams, including the ...
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Can potassium ions depolarise neuron membranes?
I am reading a journal paper about the cell adhesion molecule NCAM2 and I have come across the following statement:
To confirm the functionality of the reporters, neurons were time-lapse
recorded ...
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If due to some reasons a small portion of our neurons die, how does our body remake them?
There are various reasons such as intake of neurotoxins, and possibly traumatic injuries, that can cause neurons to die.
After several hundreds, or thousands of our neurons die, how does our body ...
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Is new idea equivalent to forming new synaptic connection?
We get new ideas quite frequently hence I am curious that is getting new idea equvant to formation of new synaptic connections? I am aware of neural plasticity but somehow doubt that it happens quite ...
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How reward / penalty is comprehended?
Technically brain is composed of billions of neurons for abstract computation of the world around us. I am bit confused that how does emotions such as fear/anger gets simulated by amygdala, which is ...
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Does GABA enhance or inhibit negative effects of glutamate? [closed]
A study on NCBI studied the correlation between a depressive mood and chronic pain. I researched this because today I noticed unusual emotional volatility as a result of 2 days of acute back pain ...
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