time travel, parallel universes, and other useful illusions
Synesthesia is a fascinating phenomenon of the mind, occurring when multiple senses seemingly “join” together. One of the more common forms is grapheme-color synesthesia, in which people see letters and numbers as having their own colors. For example, a person may see the number one as red, or seven as oddly chartreuse.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has a vision for the future – a day when people won’t just share posts, videos, and images on social networks, but also their sensory experiences, thoughts, and emotions, lifted directly from their brains.
Everyone has a unique fingerprint. No two are the same, and even each of your individual fingers are different*. We use them to access our phones, enter secured locations, or get booked after being arrested. Now, scientists at Binghamton University in New York have upped the ante. Fingerprints are old news. We’ve entered the era …
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Can a brain be revived after death? We may soon find out, as The Brain Preservation Foundation is now offering a $100,000 prize to any ambitious neuroscientists out there who can preserve a human brain.
Have you ever wondered what your brain looks like when it’s forming memories? The above video, which comes from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, shows off fluorescently tagged molecules as they traverse a mouse brain’s labyrinth of cells, forming new memories. It’s a breakthrough the researchers call a “technological tour de force.”
Scientists have performed an experiment in which they’ve linked a human brain with a rat brain, allowing the human to “wiggle” the rat’s tail with thoughts alone. This new “brain-to-brain interface” between species, as rudimentary as it is right now, should point the way to more advanced (and terrifying) ways to link brains to other brains …
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Scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada have successfully created the most complex simulation of the human brain ever. Called the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, or Spaun, the software consists of 2.5 million simulated neurons, and can recognize images, numbers and handwriting by simulating various neural activities of the human brain. Unfortunately, it …
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