Will brain control (NOTE: Subscribers can still listen to this show) someday make us all obedient servants? In the quest to understand how the brain turns sensory input into behavior, scientists have used precisely-targeted lasers to take over an animal’s brain, instruct it to turn in any direction they choose, and even to implant false sensory information, fooling the animal into thinking food was nearby.
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Starting in the 1958, the Air Force’s Project Blue Book investigated over 12,000 UFO sightings, before being closed down in 1969. More than 700 of these sightings were labeled as "unidentified."
Retired Col. Robert Friend was assigned to direct the project in order to determine whether UFOs were a national security threat or could give us scientific knowledge.
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Our language and literature are so full of metaphors that we rarely notice them–but our BRAIN does. For instance, when a character’s personality is described as "rough" or "smooth," we can relate to what this means because we’ve felt surfaces like this in the past. It turns out that the parietal operculum, the part of the brain that senses texture through touch, is activated whenever we read or hear a sensual metaphor.
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