Recent content by ManFrommars

  1. M

    MATLAB MATLAB question - meshgrid and sum.

    If it produces the correct output and you don't have to wait an age for any of it to run, it's surely fine... I don't see how you could make it less cumbersome. Matlab is a nice language for writing concise vectorised operations. I guess it's worth mentioning a general programming rule: "code...
  2. M

    Maximizing Sleep: The Science Behind Getting the Most Out of Your Zzz's

    From what I understand, everyone needs a slightly different amount of sleep, but you should probably aim for 7-8 hours a night. If you don't get enough, you build up 'sleep debt' - and yes, it is a good idea to try to catch up on your sleep debt if you haven't been sleeping enough. I am not an...
  3. M

    Can someone explain the neuroscience conjoined twins?

    You may be interested in patients with split brains too, then: The thalamus relays a lot of sensory information to higher brain areas, so it makes sense that, if their thalami are connected, then they will receive a certain amount of sensory information from the other twin's body in their...
  4. M

    [Ecology] I think I'm nuts about ecology

    Well there are certainly selfish reasons for environmentalism, but do you think that wanting to prevent future generations of humans from experiencing mass starvation and war from lack of resources is selfish? *Not* acting to reduce the impact of change to the environment is also selfish (as you...
  5. M

    Signal processing in the nervous system?

    EEG measures the changes in electric potential caused by the coordinated electrical activity of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of neurons. The EEG is a very course-grained measure of the brain's electrical state, but can be very useful as it gives you some idea about the collective...
  6. M

    Brain Stem - Posterior Anatomy Question

    Hi biferi, I'm afraid I can't answer your specific question, but you may find the tools on this web-site helpful in exploring neuroanatomy. You can look at annotated 3D neuroimaging data: http://headneckbrainspine.com/
  7. M

    Uncovering the Complexity of Single Neurons: A Look into Homoclinic Orbits

    Ah I see what you mean. Thanks for the explanation :)
  8. M

    Uncovering the Complexity of Single Neurons: A Look into Homoclinic Orbits

    Indeed (perhaps not dendrites), but I guess my point was that even if each neuron is simple, they can be connected together in different ways with complex synapse types, meaning that it's not necessarily just like connecting together billions of transistors. I'm far from an expert on the...
  9. M

    Uncovering the Complexity of Single Neurons: A Look into Homoclinic Orbits

    ... not to mention neuron-glia interactions, calcium spikes, multiple synapse types, plasticity, gap junctions... plus all the complex machinery that other cells in the body have (nucleus, mitochondria etc). It can be very useful when modelling some phenomena to abstract neurons down to very...
  10. M

    Hippocampus Location: Uncovering Its Unique Shape and Placement in the Brain

    Yes basically - the yellow bit in your picture would be the fornix (ps hippocampus is singular, hippocampi is plural :) ) This may also help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hippocampus.gif
  11. M

    Hippocampus Location: Uncovering Its Unique Shape and Placement in the Brain

    Hi, there are loads of images on the web that can explain the positions and shapes of various brain regions far better than words. Try a google image search for starters (e.g. http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=hippocampus+amygdala&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch )
  12. M

    Medical Brain analysis through neural oscillation

    For humans it's very difficult as doing anything that records with higher resolution than current methods requires getting rid of the skull. For electrical signals, the skull acts as a spatial filter, smearing together signals that are separated spatially. The effects are greater for higher...
  13. M

    Is relating Quantum field theory to the brain and how the brain works silly?

    You may find this article interesting. Abstract: For other physicsy approaches, statistical mechanics, dynamical systems & chaos theory, information theory, network theory and classical electrodynamics have all been used to construct mathematical models of various brain functions.
  14. M

    A Doubt On Working on Heart And Brain System

    Interestingly, a pioneer of EEG (Hans Berger) was originally motivated into studying electric fields from the brain to see if they could explain apparent psychic phenomena. The answer is no, the signal is not strong enough for brains to interact like that, but crucially they ARE strong enough to...
  15. M

    Neuroscience: LFP at fixed point with different simulataneous frequencies

    Sure. A Fourier transform can be used for a non-stationary signal, but you will lose any information about when the frequencies change, and just get an overall representation of all the frequencies over the whole recorded signal. So say in your LFP, for 5 seconds it has a dominant frequency of...
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