Tuesday, 21 April 2020
The rubber-hand illusion
The sense that you have a body and can distinguish what’s part of it from what’s not is with you all the time. It’s so familiar that it’s hard to imagine not having it. Yet several experiments, such as the rubber-hand-illusion experiment described in this post, show that this sense is actually a complex construct that your brain assembles from the myriad pieces of sensory information that it receives constantly. (more…)
The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
Wednesday, 8 April 2020
Spectacular advances in two-photon microscopy and two-photon calcium imaging
What if I told you that scientists had just succeeded in recording the simultaneous activity of 12 000 neurons in the cortex of a mouse as it moved freely around its cage, and that they had done so at the cellular level, down to a frequency of 17 Hertz? Would you say something like, “So what?” or “Who cares?” or “Why don’t you tell me in language I can understand?” In this post, I’m going to try to meet that last challenge. (more…)
From the Simple to the Complex | Comments Closed
