Interestingly, this information may be processed in the brain independently of established nociceptive pathways, as atropine, applied topically to the eyes fails to alter light-evoked responses in the spinal trigeminal nucleus [43].
So by extension, fMRI allows us to look at how information is processed in the brain, and is one of the few techniques we have to look directly into a person's brain while they are thinking.
Largely due to this complexity, our scientific understanding of touch -- particularly how it is processed in the brain -- is limited compared to our knowledge of other senses.
Cytowic made the case that perception was partly processed in the brain's limbic system, an ancient part of neural anatomy that handles attention, memory, and emotion.
Local immune processes in the brain of subjects with latent infections are probably accompanied by local disturbances in particular cytokine levels [ 60- 64].
However, the hallmark of neurodegenerative process in the brain of tgHD rats is gradual decrease in size of striatal neurons, unlike the significant decrease in their number in postmortem samples of HD brains.
In essence, because they can migrate to secondary lymphoid organs, CD163+ cells may be an important link between innate immune system responses triggered by the neurodegenerative process in the brain of PD patients and the induction of the adaptive immune system response in the periphery.
Furthermore, as NRG1/ ERBB4 function affects many of the above functions, including glutamatergic and GABAergic synapse stabilisation and oligodendrocyte function [ 87- 89], the modulation of NRG1 expression during adolescence may represent a point of critical interaction between this genetic risk factor and other abnormal processes in the brain of susceptible individuals.
What Malinow and his colleagues decided to do was simulate this process directly in the brain of rats, using a new technology, optogenetics, that allowed them to control the synapses that connect the hearing centers (the parts of the brain that respond to and learn about the tone) to the fear centers (the parts that respond to the electric shock).
Thus, the data suggest that schematic spiders trigger meaning-related evaluative processes in the brains of spider phobic persons similar to those observed when processing real spider pictures.
