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Book: Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind
Quotes of Book: Brain Cuttings: Fifteen
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  1. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons that responded to touching their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire in response to stimuli at the end of the rake, not on the monkey's hand. Other neurons in the brain respond to things that appear to lie within arm's reach. Training the monkeys to use the rakes caused these neurons to change-reacting to objects lying within rake's reach rather than arm's reach.
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  2. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    What is striking about them is that the father-leaning disorders tend to produce autistic symptoms. The mother-leaning disorders tend to produce schizophrenic ones.
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  3. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example. Amazingly, the "Halle Berry" neuron responded to any picture of her, including one in which she was dressed as the masked Catwoman. Even the name Halle Berry triggered that neuron, which was silent at the sight of other actresses or their names.
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  4. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. "How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself," writes Michael Alkire, an anesthesiologist at the University of California at Irvine School of Medicine, in the new Encyclopedia of Consciousness.
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  5. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents' genes.
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  6. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    When we see faces, we don't just recognize them; we also make the same face, if only for a moment.
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  7. Carl Zimmer _ Brain Cuttings: Fifteen

    In 2009, for example, a team of scientists at MIT succeded in implanting a wireless electrode into a zebra fish. With the press of a button, the scientists could wirelessly transmit a signal to the song-producing region of the bird's brain. The bird instantly stopped singing.
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