alecshao:To Be Determined

(via What the brain looks like)

Scientists can now extract personal secrets from your brain with commercial hardware

Perhaps this could be the beginning of a world where criminal justice is made easy, your boss or girlfriend or the government could spie on your thoughts and tell if you’re lying or not. That sounds great. Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but any time there’s something about scientists making advances in mind-reading technology, it’s hard not to get all hyperbolic. 

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In 1959 Kurt Schneider listed the ‘first rank features’ of shizophrenia. One of these symptoms, in the absense of organic disease, persistent affective disorder, or drug intoxiation, was sufficient for a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

The include:

MRI of a brain with a tumor.

Top: Cranial Nerve I (Olfactory Nerve) Branches in the Nasal Cavity Bottom: Base of Brain - Olfactory Nerve and Optic Chiasma Emphasized

Ever wonder why you don’t think of an event or memory for years at a time, but the unexpected whiff of a familiar smell can bring it all flooding back?

The olfactory (smell-processing) nerve is the first (I) of the cranial nerves, and is, like the other cranial nerves, directly connected to the brain. However, unlike the others, the cortex of the brain where scent is processed is not near the back of the brain. It is between the frontal and temporal lobe, very close to the long-term memory centers, and the optic olfactory nerve passes directly below the optic nerve. As such, smells can often trigger strong visual and emotional memories that had a unique scent involved, even if you didn’t notice the scent at the time.

Despite the human’s relatively weak and somewhat-insignificant sense of smell, it’s still considered the sense most closely associated with all episodic (event) long-term memories. Certain smells have been known to bring back memories more than half a century after the event occurred.

Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical. Henry Gray, 1911.

Autopsy on the brain.