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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Although neuroscientists have a general idea of what parts of the brain do what, catching them in the act is a difficult proposition. But UC Berkeley researchers have managed to do it, visualizing based on direct measurement the path of a single thought (or at least thread) through the brain.

Normal scalp-based electroencephalography (EEG) is easy to do, but it really can only get a very blurry picture of brain activity near the surface, because it has to detect all that through your hair, skin, skull, etc.

What if you could take all that stuff out of the way and put the electrodes right on the brain? That'd be great, except who would volunteer for such an invasive procedure? Turns out, a handful of folks who were already getting open-brain surgery did.

[...] We are trying to look at that little window of time between when things happen in the environment and us behaving in response to it," explained lead author Avgusta Shestyuk in the Berkeley news release. "This is the first step in looking at how people think and how people come up with different decisions; how people basically behave."

Source: TechCrunch [techcrunch.com]

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