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closeimaging spontaneous activity
Posted by BjoernBrembs on 20 Mar 2007 at 07:42 GMT
In the November 24th issue of Science, Marcus Raichle published a short "Perspectives" articles entitled "The Brain's Dark Energy":
http://www.sciencemag.org...
In this article, he presented human fMRI data showing that humans at rest (neither perceiving or doing anything) show a remarkable activity in the brain and that "The additional energy burden associated with momentary demands of the environment may be as little as 0.5 to 1.0% of the total energy budget". In other words, intrinsic processing takes up over 99% of the brain's energy.
Now, with this fantastic new technique, Drosophila researchers will be able to come up with a map of spontaneous activity in the fly brain. Using the vast transgenic toolkit of Drosophila, one can now start to unravel the neurobiological mechanisms underlying spontaneous activity. This is an absolute first in all of Neuroscience.
I will be presenting this work in our Journal Club next week and will be posting questions and comments here, should they arise.
Again, a great piece of work!
Björn