jmanfivek - Thanks for the link, that was an interesting read. The research group you linked to is the same one that appeared in the documentary I mentioned. They hadn't run the experiment yet when it aired, so all they could do was speculate based on the response of a single participant.

This is an exciting time to be following developments in neuroscience. So much has been discovered recently, and much of it is understandable even to non-experts (like me).

Ironic - with the exception of the initial demonstration of top-down processing in text comprehension, none of those have much to do with the human 'mind'. They are mostly functions of subcortical structures, primarily the retina, and some processing in the lateral geniculate nucleus (part of the thalamus). [edit] Motion detection is definitely associated with area V5 of the occipital cortex, but the data has been heavily processed by that point. The neurons in V5 are almost certainly activated by the motion illusions, but the illusion itself is caused by the wiring of the retina and LGN.

As for the text demonstration, it's worth noting that your ability to read text like that is severely hampered, though not completely degraded. This has be shown by reaction time studies of all sorts. There are even neural network models that have been developed to demonstrate exactly that effect. Still pretty neat, though.

You want fascinating - try figuring out how your brain matches up the color of those dots with the shape of them, despite the fact that the information travels in two completely separate neural pathways. It's a low-level variation of the 'binding problem' and is one of the central issues in cognitive neuroscience. Figure that out and you should pack your bags for a trip to Stockholm.

Have you people all taken a giant leap from your senses? All I have done is watch the video that was linked and read the comments here, and it seems to me that you folks are taking even bigger leaps than the report. The video did not say that the police stopped her because they saw putty, nor even that they saw it prior to arresting her. She walked into Logan Airport with a blinking breadboard on her chest. Unless she has been living in the Australian outback for the last 8 years, that sounds like about the stupidest thing one could do. Let me ask you - would you walk into Harlem with a white hood on your head on Halloween pretending to be a ghost so you could "stand out from the crowd"?

I have no idea how she was handled after apprehension, and if she was not basically immediately released upon realization that she was simply stupid, then yeah, the cops went to far. Why are airport security walking around with sub machine guns??? Are you for real? In Logan Airport? Do I think it's right? Of course not, but it's certainly understandable if not legally defensible. And where the hell were sub-machine guns mentioned anyway. Furthermore - a sub-machine gun is essentially nothing more than a pistol that shoots really fast and has a bigger clip. It's not even close to something like an M-16A4, which I have seen carried by several agents in several airports (and scares the living shit out of me).

Back to the playdoh - it was probably used to the tie the electronics down without soldering. I was a computer engineering student for 3 years before switching to neuroscience, and while given the right parts and a big enough board, I could likely work out a 4 stage pipeline, I have never once successfully soldered a circuit together. Soldering if for technicians.

Don't make mountains out of mole hills - this country has enough real injustice to deal with as it is.

I've got immense respect for Gazzaniga, but he's got one thing wrong here. He's implicitly equating consciouness with linguistic awareness. It's odd, too, because he's clearly demonstrating conscious awareness of the items in subject's left visual field. I'm guessing he's basically just simplifying things for the audience. Is this from Nova? What year?

Even though everyone in the neuroscience community calls it split-brain, it's really a misnomer, because there remains a lot of communication between the hemispheres via the amygdala and other midbrain structures. There's a lot of neat studies demonstrating this, in particular using highly emotional content.

If you want to go to the beginning though, look up Sperry's groundbreaking split-brain studies from the 60s - for which he won the Nobel Prize.

Yes, if you start it I'm sure a collective about neuroscience would do terrifically, I'd been wondering about suggesting breaking up the Science collective into smaller collectives or at least having sub-collectives. Brain.videosift.com, anyone?

@UncleJeet's super-comment;

To argue that the impact of molecular biologists, neuroscientists, particle physicists, or journalists on humanity is the creation of belief, and requires faith in their trustworthiness is a perfectly valid semantic and philosophical point.

But to imply that what these individuals test, create and share requires equivalent faith to believing the scriptures, in the minds of John Q. Public, is silly and borderline offensive.

You argue that if an individual can not personally explain the tests, data and analysis that indicate the relative truth of all discoveries off the top of their head, then their understanding of these discoveries is equivalent to faith in the gospels. Which of these are false: A)George Bush Jr. is 6ft tall, B)two planes crashed into two skyscrapers in New York in 2001, C)the amygdala in the brain plays a large part in fear responses, D)a few amino acids in different sequences, held in place by a sugar backbone, form the basic mechanism for the coding of all life on Earth.

You're one step from arguing that if I've never met George Bush or the people he hangs out with I can't tell you what his height is. If I wasn't staring at the twin towers on Sept.11th, I'm just expressing my faith that TV is showing my the truth. If I don't ablate the amygdala in a subject animal and then try to scare it, I'll never really know if neuroscience is BS'ing me. And if I can't tell you how exactly DNA and RNA code for living organisms, well, obviously its just faith.

I can only assume that no-one called you out on this because your comment was soo long.


On a similar note, many scientists are spiritual and/or classically religious. Things are hardly ever black and white.

Wikipedia is not a credible source in and of itself. If you try to cite it for any kind of legitimate scientific paper you'll get laughed out of the building. There is a difference is stem cells, but I don't think anyone here can appreciate that distinction, and I don't have the credentials to discuss it with authority.

As for Limbaugh's claim that Fox was acting because he was able to maintain eye contact with the camera, the pathways in the brain that go to the oculomotor nerve are different than those that go to spinal motor neurons, at least as far as I recall from my neuroscience class last spring.