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🔗 Molecular and Cell Biology 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Physiology 🔗 Physiology/cell

Brainbow is a process by which individual neurons in the brain can be distinguished from neighboring neurons using fluorescent proteins. By randomly expressing different ratios of red, green, and blue derivatives of green fluorescent protein in individual neurons, it is possible to flag each neuron with a distinctive color. This process has been a major contribution to the field of connectomics, traditionally known as hodology, which is the study of neural connections in the brain.

The technique was originally developed in 2007 by a team led by Jeff W. Lichtman and Joshua R. Sanes, both at Harvard University. The original technique has recently been adapted for use with other model organisms including Drosophila melanogaster, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Arabidopsis thaliana.

While earlier labeling techniques allowed for the mapping of only a few neurons, this new method allows more than 100 differently mapped neurons to be simultaneously and differentially illuminated in this manner. The resulting images can be quite striking and have won awards in science photography competitions.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Birds

Alex (May 1976 – 6 September 2007) was a grey parrot and the subject of a thirty-year experiment by animal psychologist Irene Pepperberg, initially at the University of Arizona and later at Harvard University and Brandeis University. When Alex was about one year old, Pepperberg bought him at a pet shop. The name Alex was an acronym for avian language experiment, or avian learning experiment. He was compared to Albert Einstein and at two years old was correctly answering questions made for six-year-olds.

Before Pepperberg's work with Alex, it was widely believed in the scientific community that a large primate brain was needed to handle complex problems related to language and understanding; birds were not considered to be intelligent, as their only common use of communication was mimicking and repeating sounds to interact with each other. However, Alex's accomplishments supported the idea that birds may be able to reason on a basic level and use words creatively. Pepperberg wrote that Alex's intelligence was on a level similar to dolphins and great apes. She also reported that Alex seemed to show the intelligence of a five-year-old human, in some respects, and he had not even reached his full potential by the time he died. She believed that he possessed the emotional level of a two-year-old human at the time of his death.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Neuroscience

Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis introduced by Julian Jaynes who argued human ancestors as late as the ancient Greeks did not consider emotions and desires as stemming from their own minds but as the consequences of actions of gods external to themselves. The theory posits that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind, and that the breakdown of this division gave rise to consciousness in humans. The term was coined by Jaynes who presented the idea in his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, wherein he made the case that a bicameral mentality was the normal and ubiquitous state of the human mind as recently as 3,000 years ago, near the end of the Mediterranean bronze age.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Neuroscience

Pain in babies, and whether babies feel pain, has been a large subject of debate within the medical profession for centuries. Prior to the late nineteenth century it was generally considered that babies hurt more easily than adults. It was only in the last quarter of the 20th century that scientific techniques finally established babies definitely do experience pain – probably more than adults – and developed reliable means of assessing and of treating it. As recently as 1999, it was commonly stated that babies could not feel pain until they were a year old, but today it is believed newborns and likely even fetuses beyond a certain age can experience pain.

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Animals

The following are two lists of animals ordered by the size of their nervous system. The first list shows number of neurons in their entire nervous system, indicating their overall neural complexity. The second list shows the number of neurons in the structure that has been found to be representative of animal intelligence. The human brain contains 86 billion neurons, with 16 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex.

🔗 Neuroscience

Saccadic masking, also known as (visual) saccadic suppression, is the phenomenon in visual perception where the brain selectively blocks visual processing during eye movements in such a way that neither the motion of the eye (and subsequent motion blur of the image) nor the gap in visual perception is noticeable to the viewer.

The phenomenon was first described by Erdmann and Dodge in 1898, when it was noticed during unrelated experiments that an observer could never see the motion of their own eyes. This can easily be duplicated by looking into a mirror, and looking from one eye to another. The eyes can never be observed in motion, yet an external observer clearly sees the motion of the eyes.

The phenomenon is often used to help explain a temporal illusion by the name of chronostasis, which momentarily occurs following a rapid eye-movement.