Ncc Life Quotes

We might even have to hunt for the NCC down at the subcellular level, seeking mechanisms operating inside cells rather than across large neural coalitions, as is widely assumed. Indeed, some have hypothesized, as a possible NCC, all-or-none electrical events occurring in the dendritic tree of cortical neurons, a sort of handshake confirming that a bottom-up signal has encountered top-down feedback within a certain time window.

fusiform face area with the same electrodes (fig. 6.6). Stimulating the right fusiform area led one patient to exclaim: “You just turned into someone else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy and went to the left.”18 Others reported similar distortions that bring to mind portraits painted by Francis Bacon. This didn’t happen when nearby regions were stimulated or during sham trials when Parvizi pretended to inject current. For these patients, the fusiform face area seems to be an NCC for seeing faces,19 as activity here correlates closely and systematically with seeing faces and stimulation of this region alters the perception of faces. Furthermore, damage to this region can lead to prosopagnosia or face blindness. Affected individuals are unable to recognize familiar faces, including their own.20 Faces of spouses, friends, celebrities, presidents all look alike, indistinguishable as pebbles in a riverbed. In its more severe forms, patients can’t even recognize a face as a face anymore. They perceive the distinct elements making up a face, the eyes, nose, ears, and mouth, but they can’t synthesize them into the unitary percept of a face. Intriguingly, these patients may still react unconsciously to familiar faces, with their autonomic system responding with an enhanced galvanic skin response. The unconscious has its own ways of detecting familiar faces.