Wednesday, January 16, 2013
THIS! IS! AMAZING!
This is the most important piece of science. Ever. Period. Everything before and after pales in comparison. Wheel, fire, gravity, electricity. Minor trivia.
[Later: Well, okay, it's not that big, but still plenty big!]
Part of the writeup:
...They applied Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) in the middle of the fMRI scan to temporarily disable the Wernicke area in the participants' brains. The participants, while in the MRI scanner, were performing a sentence comprehension task before, during and after the TMS was applied. Normally, the Wernickearea is a major player in sentence comprehension. The results showed that as the brain function in the Wernicke area decreased following the application of TMS, a "back-up" team of secondary brain areas immediately became activated and coordinated, allowing the individual's thought process to continue with no decrease in comprehension performance. The brain's back-up team consisted of three types of brain regions: (1) contralateral areas -- areas that are in the mirror-image location of the brain; (2) areas that are right next to the impaired area; and (3) a frontal executive area. "The first two types of back-up areas have similar brain capabilities as the impaired Wernicke area, although they are less efficient at the capability.... The third area plays a strategic role..." ...Following the TMS, the impaired area and its partners gradually returned to their previous levels of coordinated activity, while the back-up team of brain areas was still in place. "This means, that for some period of time, there were two cortical teams operating simultaneously."Go now. Read the whole thing. Still think it's the random result of random mutations? You lose. ¶ 12:05 PM
