It was a thrill for Denise Park, the neuroscientist lured to the center last year from the University of Illinois with some of Pickens' money.
During a recent test, Daniel Weissman, the neuroscientist in charge of the experiment, explained that a man lying inside the scanner would be performing different tasks, depending on the color of two numbers he sees on a screen.
Luckily, the rich repertoire of behavioral symptoms shown in cinema gives the astute neuroscientist or neurologist clues as to the anatomical and physiological underpinnings of zombie behavior.
Berman works in the lab of John Jonides, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, who is in charge of the brain-scanning experiments on the original Bing subjects.
And iconoclasts, especially successful ones, have an "affinity for new experiences, " according to the Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns.
"We are getting much more sophisticated in developing molecular ways of dealing with the damaging events in stroke, " says Solomon Snyder, a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.
In the late 1980s a young neuroscientist named Martin Schwab, now a professor at the University of Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, suspected the culprit was the spinal cord's myelin, the insulating sheath that surrounds nerves.
However, as the story goes, a neuroscientist performing these studies happened to scan his own brain seeing the same patterns.
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"That is a million times more connections than the genome has letters of DNA, " said computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is developing ways to automate the mapping of individual synapses.
Dr Pankaj Sah, a neuroscientist at the Australian National University in Canberra, welcomed the study.
Brian Cummings, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, says calling it pseudoscience would be generous.
Dr Pat Levitt, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, in Pennsylvania said the artificial brain had "really significant potential".
"We're further along in addiction than in depression and schizophrenia, " says David Self, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern.
Sebastian Seung, a computational neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working on a program that will automate this process, too.
Ann Kelley, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin Medical School, the behaviour of rats after the were given sweet, salty and fatty foods.
Nina Azari, a neuroscientist at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who also has a doctorate in theology, has looked at the brains of religious people.
Dr Mark Stokes, a cognitive neuroscientist from the University of Oxford, said it was an "exciting" piece of research that brought us closer to the concept of dream-reading machines.
"This is a watershed year" for Alzheimer's research, said Norman Relkin, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, who isn't involved with any of these trials.
Paul Sanberg, a neuroscientist at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and his colleagues, have found that a nicotine patch enhances the ability of haloperidol to suppress the symptoms of Tourette's.
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Now, Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues have tested this idea by giving extensive hearing tests to grown-ups with a wide range of reading abilities.
Justine Meaux, a neuroscientist at the privately held BrightHouse Institute for Thought Sciences in Atlanta, says the medial prefrontal cortex is active when people behold images of things to which they are extremely attached.
"If we could keep people who are still functioning from having any further decline for five years--then they would probably die from something else, " says Todd Golde, a neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic, in Jacksonville, Fla.
"People who are more likely to purchase a product show significantly higher memory encoding than those who are less likely, " explains Richard Silberstein, a neuroscientist with the Brain Sciences Institute at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
"We know that animals in 'germ-free' conditions can reproduce, they have a longer lifespan, and they seem to live perfectly OK, provided you don't expose them to stress or damage, " said Sven Pettersson, the Karolinska Institute microbiologist who, along with neuroscientist Rochellys Diaz Heijtz, led the research.
"This is a fantastic example of how the response of cells changes due to a behavioral paradigm, " said theoretical neuroscientist Harel Shouval of the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, who was not involved in the study but has worked previously with the researchers.
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The field is so new that it didn't have a name until 1995, when Indiana University neuroscientist Olaf Sporns dubbed the nervous system's tangle of cells and synapses the "connectome" (pronounced connect-tome).
Researchers "from top labs across the country are coming to California, " says neuroscientist Zach W. Hall, who oversees the effort.
"You can capture a map of the circuit in the brain that was active, " said Brookhaven neuroscientist Panayotis K. Thanos, who helped develop the technique.
WSJ: Brain Science: Mysterious Neural Circuitry Becomes Viewable
"It allows us to keep the system intact but lets us see within it, " said Stanford neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth, who pioneered the technique.
WSJ: Brain Science: Mysterious Neural Circuitry Becomes Viewable
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