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The most famous and important discovery of Santiago Ramón y Cajal was the neuron, a cellular entity proven to be the basic anatomical, physiological, genetic, and metabolic unit of the nervous system. In the 1890s, Cajal provided indisputable evidence of distinct cerebral individuality in the form of his portraits of neurons, which finely—finally—revealed the composition of our mysterious mental matter. As profoundly true as great science and as truly creative as great art, the investigations of Cajal offer rare and precious insights into life and its infinitely small secrets.
via The Beautiful Brain: A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Artist
Image: Drawing of a Purkinje cell in the cerebellar cortex done by Cajal, after using the Golgi stain.
“The book’s most interesting chapter is called “The Watch”. It’s about that hour or two of wakefulness which occurs in the middle of the night, between the first sleep and the second sleep. You know the one…right? Neither did I, but apparently, this makes us a bit weird, historically speaking.
Warren says that until the era of artificial lighting and alarm clocks, sleep was segmented. It was common for people to sleep twice each night, with a bout of awakeness in the middle. This nocturnal alertness wasn’t quite like daytime waking, though: it was more relaxed, less focussed, carefree.
There are two lines of evidence for this. Writings from the pre-modern era routinely make reference to “first sleep” and “second sleep”, and in many languages, although not modern English, there were special words for these periods and the wakefulness between.”
”They emit electrical signals of around 40 hertz, which sound like a buzzing, irritating noise played back as audio files. I used some specialist software to distinguish the signal within the noise - and to produce sound from within each peak that is closer to the frequency of a human voice and therefore more revealing to the ear.
Listening to the results reprocessed at around 300 Hz, the audio files have the hypnotic quality of sea birds calling. There is a sense that each spike is modulated subtly within itself, and it sounds as if there are discrete signals in which one neuron in some sense “addresses” another. Could we be eavesdropping on the language of the brain?”
via The Secrets of Intelligence Could Lie Within A Single Cell
(New Scientist)
via cloois:
Human neural stem cells from fetal cortex stained for DNA (blue), neuronal (green) and astrocyte (red) markers. Corey Seehus IN Cell Image Competition.
(via neuroimages)
Implied motion in Hokusai Manga : Neurophilosophy
“Artists employ a number of different techniques to represent implied motion in two-dimensional works.
The Japanese artist and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) used a different and innovative technique to convey motion. The simple line drawings in his Manga strips lack all of the commonly-used motion effects, yet give a strong impression of movement by depicting the human body in highly unstable postures. As a new study just published in the journal NeuroReport shows, the figures in the sketches are perceived to be moving because their gravity-defying postures activate regions of the visual cortex that are sensitive to motion.”
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Handel - Largo from “Xerxes”
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Take one step out the front door, and an individual brain cell fires. Pass by your rose bush on the way to the car, another specific neuron fires. And so it goes....
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