Researchers at MIT have developed an imaging technique that will help study exactly how electrical signals propagate through the brain, in an advance that could help us better understand Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, and other brain disorders, as well as how thoughts and feelings are formed.
Brain MRIs offer important insight into how our brains work, but they can only produce crude approximations of the areas that are activated by a given stimulus. In order to unravel the minutiae of how neurons communicate and collaborate to form thoughts and feelings, we would need imaging tools with vastly improved resolutions.
Today, far from being able to tackle the 86 billion neurons in the human brain, neuroscientists must settle for studying simple organisms like worms and fish larvae (with neuron counts in the hundreds), relying on slow and cumbersome methods like implanting electrodes into brain tissue to detect electrical signals.
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