R. Douglas Fields

It is also difficult to reference any of Berger's specific findings, as the citations for these fourteen papers differ only by the year of publication. Cloaking his findings in this way hid them from the larger scientific community and diminished their impact.

Simple cells might then assemble into primitive organisms - all initiated by a spark - and through eons of evolution the tree of life would expand and ultimately yield Homo sapiens, ...

"What am I supposed to be trying to do?" I ask.
"You don't need to ..." Robin halts her reply to my question and turning to Jessica, she says under her breath, "Did you see what he said to me?"
Rephrasing my question, I ask, "How do I interpret that screen?"
"You see, that's what I knew would happen," Robin says in a tone conveying good-natured, restrained frustration, Jessica giggles knowingly. "You thinker," she scolds, "So the cool thing is that your amygdala knows exactly what is going on already. The conscious mind is really way too stupid to do anything to affect it." She and Robin chuckle, They've already cracked into my brain with their machine. They knew I would take a left-brained, analytical approach to neurofeedback, and that tack would not be of much help.

Consciousness has long mystified philosophers and scientists. What is conscious awareness? Do animals have it? Consciousness touches on the most fundamental question in philosophy, psychology, and biology, of how the brain creates the mind.

In 1949, Giuseooe Moruzzi and Horace Winchell Magoun found that electrical stimulation of the midbrain reticular formation instantly desynchronized the slowly oscillating EEG and aroused sleeping animals.

Many labs conducting research in the last few decades, including mine, have identified the detailed cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory consolidation. The key distinction between short-term and long-term memory is that genes must be turned on and new proteins made for long-term memory but not for short-term memory.

Science is a luxury that can only be practiced in societies after all the basic needs of life have been obtained, because scientific research requires substantial funding and public support. For this reason, science does not proceed at the pace of scientific innovation; it proceeds at a pace, and in the specific directions, that is funded by the public or business. Research can be stalled or halted by regulations.

As you well appreciate by now, no matter what you may read in sensational articles, neuroscientists do not yet understand how thoughts, emotions, and intentions are coded in the pattern of neural impulses zipping through neural circuits and sweeping through brain tissue as oscillating brainwaves. The neural code is still a mystery, but computers using advanced machine learning can begin to recognize patterns of electrical activity that are associated with a specific sensory or motor function, and use that insight as a reliable signal to trigger prosthetic devices to perform useful functions. This is a complex process, far from being able to decode neural impulses as one would read computer code.

Dyslexia is commonly referred to as a dysfunction. While it is certainly a serious disability in the modern world, I would not consider it a dysfunction, because reading is not a normal brain function.