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Researchers working at MIT have successfully manipulated the content of a rat's dream by replaying an audio cue that was associated with the previous day's events, namely running through a maze (what else). The breakthrough furthers our understanding of how memory gets consolidated during sleep — but it also holds potential for the prospect of "dream engineering." Working at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, neuroscientist Matt Wilson was able to accomplish this feat by exploiting the way the brain's hippocampus encodes self-experienced events into memory. Scientists know that our hippocampus is busy at work replaying a number of...

Is evil over? Has science finally driven a stake through its dark heart? Or at least emptied the word of useful meaning, reduced the notion of a numinous nonmaterial malevolent force to a glitch in a tangled cluster of neurons, the brain? Yes, according to many neuroscientists, who are emerging as the new high priests of the secrets of the psyche, explainers of human behavior in general. A phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brain books with titles like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for...

Got Brain? By Donnel Jones, April 20, 2004 Home   Search   Forum   Terms The New York Times hits a new low with coverage of an "experiment" that seeks to determine the activity of a person's brain and how that correlates to their being a Democrat or Republican. Science meets pseudo-science. We might as well have Dr. Mengele use his medical training to ascertain the essence of "Jewishness" using various "technologies." Of course, the researchers here are not sadistic half-man who torture children. Rather, they are wasting their patron's money (who is financing this nonsense, anyway?) with technologies that have proved invaluable in medical...