"If you can't have the [static magnetic] field you love, love the [static magnetic] field you have." - William A. Edelstein

Ever have an MRI? If so, you benefited from many inventions by Bill Edelstein, whose passing, earlier this week, is mourned by many.

"C480782"

I shared on Facebook photographs of Weston model 301 milliammeter number 480782, made in Newark, NJ; acquired by the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering; surplussed by the MIT Department of Physics. Check it out.

Understatement of the Week?

"In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents."

–The opening sentence of the article "Connecting the Neural Dots" by John Markoff in today's New York Times.

One Night Only: The Brontes, Live!

We loved Dizzy Miss Lizzie's production of "The Brontes" at last summer's Capital Fringe Festival, and next Monday (January 7th) at 6 PM, NeuroCooking friends in the National Capital Area have a chance to see it at the Kennedy Center, for free.

Title of the week!

"'Doctor' or 'darling'? Decoding the communication partner from ECoG* of the anterior temporal lobe during non-experimental, real-life social interaction" appears in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

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*"ECoG" (pronounced "ee-cog" = Electrocorticography or intracranial EEG)

James Charles Marshall, 1923-2012

"You come running in on platform shoes
with Marshall stacks
to at least just give us a clue..."

R.I.P. Jim Marshall.

"People have minds."

"In sum, bodies have brains. People have minds."

- from "Please Mind the Gap: How To Podcast Your Brain" by Karen Spaceinvaders on Continent ("Please click to listen to the mp3 files of deep brain recordings of individual brain cells, the smallest unit of the brain, in a whole, intact living brain.").

Inhibition is key.

Two sentences* from the third chapter of Prof. György Buzsáki's 2006 book "Rhythms of the Brain":

"In the absence of inhibition, any external input, weak or strong, would generate more or less the same one-way pattern, an avalanche of excitation involving the whole population."

"Without inhibition and dedicated interneurons, excitatory circuits cannot accomplish anything useful."

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*from pages 61 & 78, respectively, of the 2011 paperback edition.

Sometimes, a brain does "light up"

Energy-efficient brain-shaped light bulb by Solovyov Design.