Activity Type Title

Chapter 1. Chapter

Article

From the Pages of Scientific American

Electric Surprise

From the pages of Scientific American. Electric Surprise. Stimulating brain cells may be trickier than we thought. Scientists and doctors have long used electricity to both study and treat the brain. But a report in the August 27,2009, issue of Neuron indicates that the brain’s response to electricity is exceptionally complex. Using a new type of optical imaging, Harvard Medical School researchers observed neurons as they were stimulated by an electrode. Instead of activating a small sphere of surrounding neurons as expected, the electrodes caused sparse strings of neurons to fire across the brain. The finding suggests that brain surgeons and the designers of neural prosthetics have a much smaller margin of error than previously thought—shifting an electrode even slightly could activate an entirely different set of neurons. The author is Melinda Wenner. Reproduced with permission. Copyright 2010 Scientific American, a division of Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved.

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1.1 Quiz

1. What did researchers expect to happen when they stimulated neurons with an electrode?

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2. What did researchers actually find when they stimulated neurons with an electrode?

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3. The Scientific American segment Electric Surprise suggests that the researchers’ findings would be especially important for the work of which groups?

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4. The Harvard researchers found the unexpected pattern of neural activation through brain imaging. Which of these is NOT a means of seeing brain functioning through imaging?

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5. It’s easy for researchers to use electrodes to activate neurons, because neurons naturally generate spikes of electrical energy. The spike is called the:

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