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Article: Bridging the brain gap: a scientist explores the biology of isolated minds and mutual trust.(Cover Story)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- November 2, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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When a rabbit whiffs an onion, glimpses another rabbit, hears a loud sound, feels itself enveloped by a pair of hands, or otherwise encounters the world through its senses, electrical activity crackles through the creature's brain in a curious way. Within a fraction of a second, groups of neurons that greet incoming sensations generate a distinctive electrical burst that materializes again in the brain's outer layer, or cortex. There, the activity vanishes, poof, "just like the rabbit down the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland," remarks neurophysiologist Walter J. Freeman of the University of California, Berkeley.
Freeman, who has described this electrical ...