Science. It works.

In case anyone missed this week’s major headline:

After several weeks of neurorehabilitation (intensive training and shocks to the brain and spine), previously paralyzed rats initiated a walking gait and soon began sprinting, climbing stairs and avoiding obstacles. Work to test the techniques in humans is under way. Really cool.

Ever think about how the brain named itself?

Brains

Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels.

Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near, referencing Roska and Werblin’s article in Nature ‘Vertical Interactions Across Ten Parallel, Stacked Representations in the Mammalian Retina’ (March 29, 2001)

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This is Krista and Tatiana Hogan, conjoined twins that share a neural bridge in the thalamus. This means that they can possibly share senses and thoughts. Check out the video.

Read more about them in the NY Times feature: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/magazine/could-conjoined-twins-share-a-mind.html?ref=science

So, scientists glued this miniature computer data logger onto a frigate’s head in order to track its brain waves during flight. They want to know if they sleep when they fly and migrate. Their first attempt to create a breathable and waterproof housing for the loggers worked well in the laboratory but failed under field conditions; seawater penetrated into the zinc batteries and they are trying again with a different housing.

The report is a beautiful example of how challenging scientific research can be and how unpredictable and “messy” the trajectory from questions-to-data-to-more-questions often is. The challenges don’t represent failures but learning experiences requiring intuition and problem-solving. That is science for you.

The scientists are keeping a blog here: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/sleep-loggers-take-two/?ref=science

Congenitally blind people use the visual part of their brains (the occipital cortex) for language. It goes to show you how brain real estate is super valuable. One prediction that we can make from this finding is that “a blind individual would be more resilient to brain damage to classic language regions,” says Marina Bedny, a researcher at MIT.

SO, if you like to ride motorcycles and then crash and the injuries to your brain are primarily in the language regions, well let’s hope that you were blind to begin with so that you can still talk and put together sentences.