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Showing posts from April, 2018

Technology to study the brain[i]

The brain is a complex and sophisticated organ made by a lot of layers and billions of cells that is able to study itself. It is not simple, but today, scientists have three main ways to investigate a live brain safely, which is, not being harmful to someone and thus they try to relate our behavior with brain areas. The first method is electroencephalography (EGG), which was invented 100 years ago and it measures electrical waves that happen when the brain cells communicate with each other. It provides us information to identify precisely when electric signals occur during activities like learning or paying attention and registering them in just milliseconds and from that we can extract patterns to study diseases such as epilepsy. fMRI (functional magnetic resonant images), the second way to analyze how the brains work, is a technique to measure how quickly oxygen is consumed by brain cells showing which regions are involved during a cognitive or behavior activity. With thes...