- What long-running neuroscience debate did Harrison's real-time observation settle?
Neuroscience
The study of the nervous system and brain function.
- What personal conviction originally drove Hans Berger to search for electrical activity in the brain?
- How did Berger's modified galvanometer record electrical oscillations from the scalp?
- What is the alpha wave, and how does it change when a person opens their eyes or does mental arithmetic?
- Why did Berger wait five years before publishing his EEG results?
- How did Cajal's drawings of neurons prove that the nervous system was made of discrete cells rather than a continuous web?
- What method did Walter Hess use to map the functions of the diencephalon in cats?
- What was prefrontal leucotomy, and why did the scientific verdict on it change so dramatically after 1949?
- Why did Hodgkin and Huxley use the giant axon of a squid for their nerve impulse experiments?
- How did this trio's findings become the foundation for understanding anaesthesia and epilepsy?
- Why was the legal status of brain death an unresolved question at the time of the operation?
- How does a SQUID exploit the Josephson effect to detect extremely faint magnetic fields?
- What did split-brain patients reveal about how independently the two hemispheres can function?
- Why was severing the corpus callosum used to treat severe epilepsy in the first place?
- How did Hubel and Wiesel discover that visual cortex neurons respond to specific features like edges and angles?
- What fields of biology and medicine were reshaped once patch-clamp made individual channel behavior observable?
- What yogic claim about nostril breathing and brain hemispheres did this study set out to test?
- What method did Yagyu's team use to measure the brain's response to different gum flavours?
- Why does the brain process peppermint and fruit flavours differently in the first place?
- What difference did Eleanor Maguire's team find in the hippocampi of licensed London taxi drivers?
- How did hippocampus size correlate with a driver's years of experience?
- What did this finding suggest about how plastic the adult human brain really is?
- What assumption about brain size and cognitive complexity did the discovery challenge?
- Why does each sensory neuron in the nose express only one type of odour receptor?
- Why does smell reach the brain through a route linked to memory and emotion?
- Why did Rind and Simmons choose scenes from Star Wars to stimulate the locust's visual system?
- How has the wrinkling equation been applied outside of physics, such as to brain folding?
- Why did a dead salmon appear to show brain activity in response to photographs of human emotion?
- What statistical step, when skipped, causes spurious clusters of activity to appear in fMRI scans?
- How did the dead salmon study change practices in neuroimaging research?
- What are place cells and how did John O'Keefe discover them in the hippocampus of rats?
- How do grid cells in the entorhinal cortex tile space in a repeating triangular lattice?
- Why does damage to the hippocampus so severely impair a person's ability to navigate?
- Why is loss of navigational ability often one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer's disease?
- How does the frontal cortex actively project face-like templates onto ambiguous visual noise?
- What made Oliver Sacks' clinical case studies different from conventional neurology writing?
- How did Sacks write about his own terminal illness in his final months?
- How does the mirror box illusion trick the brain into updating its body map?
- Why does scratching a mirror-reflected arm reduce the itch on the actual, unreachable arm?
- What is the ventral pallidum, and how does its activity differ in cheese-averse people?
- What neurological fingerprint did researchers find in the brains of people with misophonia?
- How did Karl Deisseroth combine these microbial proteins to switch neurons on and off with light?