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posted by janrinok on Sunday December 04 2016, @06:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the watching-thoughts dept.

By significantly increasing the speed of functional MRI (fMRI), researchers funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) have been able to image rapidly fluctuating brain activity during human thought. fMRI measures changes in blood oxygenation, which were previously thought to be too slow to detect the subtle neuronal activity associated with higher order brain functions. The new discovery that fast fMRI can detect rapid brain oscillations is a significant step towards realizing a central goal of neuroscience research: mapping the brain networks responsible for human cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and awareness.

[...] Combining several new techniques, Jonathan R. Polimeni, Ph.D., senior author of the study, and his colleagues at Harvard's Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, applied fast fMRI in an effort to track neuronal networks that control human thought processes, and found that they could now measure rapidly oscillating brain activity. The results of this groundbreaking work are reported in the October 2016 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday December 05 2016, @06:32AM

    by mhajicek (51) on Monday December 05 2016, @06:32AM (#437073)

    "Beta wave, or beta rhythm, is the term used to designate the frequency range of human brain activity between 12.5 and 30 Hz (12.5 to 30 transitions or cycles per second)."

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_wave [wikipedia.org]

    My first computer tan at 4.7 MHz, so I think we'll get there in my lifetime.

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