Tuesday, June 1, 2010

The Hidden Brain

It took Sherlock Holmes to deduce the significance of the dog that didn’t bark.* So maybe it’s understandable that neuroscientists have traditionally ignored the brain activity that just hums away quietly in the background when the brain isn’t doing much of anything. Assuming this “default” or “resting” activity was meaningless random noise, they went so far as to subtract it out—and thus ignore it—on brain images such as PET scans and fMRIs

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