Patch clamping allows investigators to record the firing of individual neurons with great precision.
Could an initially random group of 10 to 15 neurons, with practice, be coaxed into forming a stable motor memory?
What emerged was a kind of beaded rainbow belt of neurons, with the fluorescent glow radiating out through each cell's neural branches.
One day, though, a computer chip may do some of the work of a damaged hippocampus, replacing living neurons with silicon ones.
God, where were we before the Twilight saga stole all our neurons, with its hormone-detonating tales of supernatural events in the rain-sodden town of Forks, Washington?
Now the brain mechanic is working on "Neurogrid", a silicon model consisting of 16 microchips, which will mimic up to a million neurons with 6bn connections.
Only two millimetres long and half a millimetre thick, this area still contains 10,000 neurons with extensions that lead to thousands of brain cells.
Lately, Rogers has been following the emergence of a new research field called optogenetics, which entails threading light-emitting devices into the brain to trigger neurons with photons.
Dr. George has studied the behavior of neurons with a sodium-channel defect that occurs in a certain type of inherited epilepsy.
These cells have a limited capacity for self-renewal when grown in the lab, but can generate mature astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and neurons with normal electrical properties.
"Untitled" (1945), a small pastel, is like a map of neurons with dendrites and axons, blobs and lines that connect at various synapses.
