Imagine the power with just a thought to close or open doors, turn lights on and off, manipulate a thermostat or move a cursor across a computer screen. Or imagine the ability to delve willfully into your own subconscious and surface those hidden secrets. Science fiction, right. Right? Wrong.

Dr. Sanjay Singh last night presented six illustrations of huge advances in neuroscience discovery at a UNMC Science Café event hosted at Slowdown. In this Part I today, I will provide a brief snapshot of three of the wonders that he had to reveal. I will post the other three in Part II on Friday.

1 – What is art? Why are we attracted to some things and not others and why is art so subjective? Can science define it? Can it be defined through neuroscience? It is early days to answer this question, but Dr. Singh suggested an ancient Sanskrit text may hold one part of the answer, because it provided a definition of art that scientists could test against. The definition was that art is the defining characteristic of an object exaggerated.

Scientists have tested this using seagulls and rats. The rat experiment gave the rats the choice of a rectangle or a square. If they went to the rectangle, they got cheese. If they went to the square, they got nothing. After a while, the rats were given the choice between the rectangle and another exaggerated rectangle. The rats all chose the exaggerated rectangle.

Applying this to seagulls, one species has a red mark on its beak. The newly hatched chick pecks at the mother’s beak to get the mother to regurgitate food. A newly hatched chick pecked at a stick with a red mark, indicating that this was a hard wired reaction. When a newly hatched chick was presented simultaneously with the mother’s beak and a stick with exaggerated red marks, the chicks all ignored the mother and pecked at the stick!

How are human reactions to art hardwired? Are our responses subjective or dependent upon specific neural activity?

2 – A patient paralyzed from the neck down had a tiny chip embedded in a very specific part of his brain, controlling motor skills. While the connection between his brain’s commands and nerve system was cut, his brain remained electrically active. The chip picked up that activity and, using wireless connectivity, the chip translated an instruction from the brain to, for example, move the patient’s right hand, as a command to move something else in the room connected to the chip, such as a computer cursor, an automatic door control, light dimmer, etc. The patient was immobile but able, through the simple act of thinking, capable of controlling his external environment. This is topical, given this related story in this article in the New York Times yesterday.

3 – No less than the history of modern civilization Dr. Singh asserts is to be found in the recent discovery of mirror neurons in the brain. Purely by accident, a researcher discerned that observing someone else do something our own brains showed the same neural activity as would be displayed if we did the same act ourselves. It is suggested that this function of our brains began some 15,000 – 10,000 years ago and was the beginning of human ability to empathize, understand the reactions of others and connect more emotionally with the world and people around us. Thus began a huge step forward in human development, which had progressed rather more slowly in the preceding 240,000 years. This also, Dr. Singh more lightheartedly observed, throws light on our enjoyment of culture, art and film.

Thanks to UNMC and Slowdown for putting this teaser series together. More are proposed and if this one is anything to go by, they will open your mind to new worlds. Click here to find out more about UNMC Science Café. Look out for Part II of this post on Friday.

Tags: Dr. Sanjay Singh, science cafe, UNMC

Written by Stuart
David Day | Associates
About the Author: Stuart is constantly curious and believes conversation matters, for business, people and community. Feel free to join in...

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Art, Fun, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.