All things brain...

[MarcusA]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-mind-of-an-octopus/

octopuses and all the cephalopods have always fasvcinated me.

most definitions of "non human intelligence" boil down to "similar to human."

not these guys.

I love Cuttlefish, moody little bastards.

[Tank]

I found a baby one on a beach rock pool when I was a kid. It was no bigger than my thumb. Cutest little thing.

[MarcusA]

Brains, brains, brains!

[No one]

I found a good connection for for high quality aged infant brains. Vintage years. Any flavor.

[Dark Lightning]

I found a good connection for for high quality aged infant brains. Vintage years. Any flavor.

Got any with a bit of tobacco smoke?

[MarcusA]

Beans, beans, beans! My beanie is on my bean.

[MarcusA]

Jellyfish don't have a brain.

[MarcusA]

Jellyfish are just blobs that sting really.

[Tank]

And some are immortal.

Turritopsis dohrnii

[MarcusA]

To be immortal, you have to be brainless.

[billy rubin]

they dont have a cetraized brain, but their nervous system workscwell enough.

[Recusant]

Oh dear. One for the "near-death" folks.

"Scientists Detect Brain Activity in Dying People Linked to Dreams, Hallucinations" | Vice

We've all heard eerie stories about people who almost perished, but survived to tell the tale of the strange visions and emotions they experienced when they were close to death. Now, scientists have observed a surge of energetic activity in the brains of dying patients, a discovery that reveals that our brains can be active even as our hearts stop beating, reports a new study.

The results challenge a longstanding assumption that brains become nonfunctional as they lose oxygen during cardiac arrest, and could eventually open a new window into the weird phenomena associated with near-death experiences (NDE). 


Jimo Borjigin, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan, has been interested in these questions since she first observed surges of activity in the brains of dying rats a decade ago. The surges consisted of gamma waves, the fastest oscillations in the brain, which are associated with conscious perceptions, lucid dreams, and hallucinations.

Now, Borjigin and her colleagues have discovered similar gamma activity in the brains of patients who died in the hospital while they were monitored by electroencephalogram (EEG) sensors, which record neural activity. The researchers examined EEG readings from a small sample size of four unresponsive patients who were removed from life support with the permission of their families. During cardiac arrest, two of the people experienced complex gamma activity in a "hot zone" of the brain that is critical for conscious processing.

[. . .]

"The dying brain was thought to be inactive; our study showed otherwise," said Borjigin, the senior author of the study, in an email to Motherboard. "The discovery of the marked and organized gamma activities in the dying brain suggests that NDE is the product of the dying brain, which is activated at death."

[Continues . . .]

The paper is open access:

"Surge of neurophysiological coupling and connectivity of gamma oscillations in the dying human brain" | PNAS

Abstract:

The brain is assumed to be hypoactive during cardiac arrest. However, animal models of cardiac and respiratory arrest demonstrate a surge of gamma oscillations and functional connectivity.

To investigate whether these preclinical findings translate to humans, we analyzed electroencephalogram and electrocardiogram signals in four comatose dying patients before and after the withdrawal of ventilatory support. Two of the four patients exhibited a rapid and marked surge of gamma power, surge of cross-frequency coupling of gamma waves with slower oscillations, and increased interhemispheric functional and directed connectivity in gamma bands. High-frequency oscillations paralleled the activation of beta/gamma cross-frequency coupling within the somatosensory cortices.

Importantly, both patients displayed surges of functional and directed connectivity at multiple frequency bands within the posterior cortical "hot zone," a region postulated to be critical for conscious processing. This gamma activity was stimulated by global hypoxia and surged further as cardiac conditions deteriorated in the dying patients. These data demonstrate that the surge of gamma power and connectivity observed in animal models of cardiac arrest can be observed in select patients during the process of dying.

[MarcusA]

The brain has its own genius.

[The Magic Pudding.]

The brain has its own genius.

Crap Crap Crap Crap Crap
Crapity Crap Crap
I'm a frick'n genius

[MarcusA]

The brain has its own genius.

Crap Crap Crap Crap Crap
Crapity Crap Crap
I'm a frick'n genius

You're a chicken head.