Necessary brain

Is your brain really necessary?

"Professor John Lorber has a facility for making doctors sit up and think about hallowed concepts," writes Adrian Bower, a neuroanatomist at Sheffield University, England, where Lorber holds a research chair in pediatrics. "The human brain is the current object of his challenging speculation," continues Bower, referring to his colleague's recent propositions concerning hydrocephalus, or water o...

Synaptic pruning by microglia is necessary for normal brain development.

Microglia are highly motile phagocytic cells that infiltrate and take up residence in the developing brain, where they are thought to provide a surveillance and scavenging function. However, although microglia have been shown to engulf and clear damaged cellular debris after brain insult, it remains less clear what role microglia play in the uninjured brain. Here, we show that microglia activel...

Learning is necessary for training induced brain plasticity

Introduction. It is well established that brain structure is plastic and can reorganize in response to specific stimuli; however, it has only recently been recognized that these changes can manifest as volumetric differences detected on MRI [1-2]. We have previously shown in mice that five days of spatial memory training using a water-maze is sufficient to cause region specific local volume cha...

Almost Necessary

A formula is contingent if it is possibly true and possibly false. A formula is noncontingent if it is not contingent, i.e., if it is necessarily true or necessarily false. In an epistemic setting, ‘a formula is contingent’ means that you are ignorant about its value, whereas ‘a formula is non-contingent’ means that you know whether it is true. Although non-contingency is definable in terms of ...

A Necessary Condition for Weyl-Heisenberg Frames