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Weak Electrical Field Found To Carry Information Around the Brain (eurekalert.org)
Zothecula writes: In a development that could lead to improved understanding of memory formation and epilepsy, scientists have discovered a new way information may be traveling throughout the brain. The team has identified slow-moving brainwaves it says could be carried only by the brain's gentle electrical field (abstract), a mechanism previously thought to be incapable of spreading neural signals altogether. "Although the electrical field is of low amplitude, the field excites and activates immediate neighbors, which, in turn, excite and activate immediate neighbors, and so on across the brain at a rate of about 0.1 meter per second."
I have to wonder if this isn't a path to telepathy, either natural or mediated by technology.
The idea that cell phones 'heat up your brain' or cause direct brain damage is pretty ridiculous, given the energies involved.
This would seem to suggest that while actual BRAIN damage is still impossible, it's perhaps not impossible that such EMF may interfere with these just-discovered slow-moving signals and whatever they do.
Interesting data on the variety and strength of EMF we encounter daily is here;
http://www.who.int/peh-emf/abo...
Hopefully someone with a better understanding of how these compare to the "2.5â"5 mV/mm" quoted in the abstract can comment.
-Styopa
I was wondering if it maybe actually lends credence to people who claim they have allergies to various types of EM.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Almost the exact same thing was demonstrated with evolovable hardware in the 90s:
http://www.damninteresting.com...
Programmable circuits were trained through an evolutionary process to perform certain tasks. At the end of the process they performed the tasks perfectly, but the actual circuits that were produced were not understandable or functional under the normal rules of circuit design, using roundabout methods for the components to effect each other that were dependent on the exact design of the model of programmable circuit they were using. Try to implement the same circuit design using other hardware and it would just fail to do anything at all.
Evolution will "make use" of anything it can, even and perhaps especially factors that no intelligent designer would ever consider.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Except these people are usually allergic to whatever is the current latest technology whether it be cellphones, wifi or whatever. Oddly none of them seem to be allergic to domestic electrical power cables which emit frequencies far closer to brainwaves than VHF and UHF devices.
If this does prove to be a mechanism used by organic nervous systems to move information around the neural network (something akin to bias in an old-style electronic circuit?), we will need to create and understand a similar mechanism for silicon-based computing platforms as a necessary step towards creating true machine intelligence.
The unit is irrelevant, significant figures are what denote the accuracy of measurement. 100mm, 10cm, and .1m all have the same amount of significant figures, so the original complaint is still valid.
No. Completely different frequencies, and 99% of the EM allergy people are purely psychosomatic. The very few who actually do show a difference between a device that's transmitting and a device with a blinking red light and some fake antennas seem to be keying to some element other than EM, such as high frequency switching noise from a poorly designed transformer.
This may lend support to electromagnetic theories of consciousness.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Meh, this doesn't seem like it's news yet.
Headline: "Weak Electrical Field Found To Carry Information Around the Brain"
Link: "The only explanation left is an electrical field effect."
They haven't actually measured or proven it yet, and it seems to conflict with existing evidence that electromagnetism doesn't influence thought.
Yes. Why are you mixing metric (meters, kilogram) with Imperial units (hour)? Shouldn't you be using a base 10 system for keeping time if you're going to be a pompous ass?
The hour isn't an Imperial unit.
It isn't metric either, but it is among the non-SI units mentioned in the SI. The second, along with the other units in the GP, is not only metric but also part of the SI system that most of the world uses these days.
How's that for pompous? ;)
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley
I was wondering if it maybe actually lends credence to people who claim they have allergies to various types of EM.
I was wondering the same thing. Last year I was involved in the construction of a large (4 meter cube) copper-screened Faraday cage for 100Kv partial discharge testing. When we buttoned it up, I went inside and closed the door. It was oddly quiet - even though it was simply screen. At the time, I wondered if there was something to the idea that our brain was susceptible to RF energy. It was strangely peaceful and enjoyable.
Place nail here >+
You're making the same mistake everyone does when dealing with significant figures for the first time. "100mm" is only a single sigfig, the trailing zeros don't count for anything unless followed by a decimal. If you wanted to indicate 3 sigfigs for 100mm you'd write it as "100.mm" or preferably "1.00x10^2mm".
Just fucking don't go there. My wife is one of those nutters. She opens the kitchen windows if I've been using the microwave.
There's an old joke about people who complained about a radio mast that they said was causing all kinds of problems from eczema to sour milk. The owner apologised, and hoped that it wouldn't get worse when the time came to switch it on.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I don't know what you mean by "a single instance" in this case. If you mean "instant", then that would be an infinitesemal unit of time during which you could cover in an infinitesemal distance in space (ds/dt). What you suggest is that if you plot position over time, you can't ever identify the slope of the tangent line at a given point, but of course you can do that with calculus using limits. There is no rate of change between a point and itself, but the instantaneous velocity at that point does represent an actual physical quantity, kinetic energy, with respect to the object's mass.
In a physical sense, you can't really look at "zero" time because of the continuous "analog" nature of the universe. You can look at smaller and smaller units of time, but you actually can't get to zero. On a subatomic scale, you end up hitting a fundamental limit of being able to know both position and momentum (mass*velocity) of a particle simultaneously. That's the kind of weirdness that gives you cats that are both dead and alive.
"That which does not kill us makes us stranger." -Trevor Goodchild