A few weeks ago, Japanese scientists released video footage of the neurons firing in a baby zebra fish brain while it hunted for food. It was pretty cool. This week, researchers at Stanford University announced they have used a similar technique to capture real-time neuronal images from a mouse brain. It’s pretty cool, too.
As in the fish study, Stanford scientists used gene therapy to elicit a bright, fluorescent green flashes from mouse neurons whenever they fired. From there, they implanted an extremely small microscope in the mouse’s brain, just above the hippocampus. According to a university press release describing the experiment, the camera was able to capture the activity of about 700 hippocampal neurons. A microchip wired to the camera transmitted the images to a monitor for the scientists to view.
For the rest of the story: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-is-how-a-brain-looks-when-its-forming-memories
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