For 250 years now, our economy has mostly been about one thing figuring out more ways to burn fossil fuel. That’s what what’s who we are. If an alien landed in the us, they’d doughtless send work back to headquarters that they’d discovered a race of flesh colored devices for combusting coal and gas and oil. The year 2009 us such an interesting moment because after 20 years of thinking and taking and worrying about global warming, the world is finally edging closer to actually doing something about it. In December, the world’s leaders meet to negotiate a new climate treaty. Since doing something about the climate can only be defined as wearing ourselves off that coal, gas and oil, any effective treaty will in essense reboot civilization. If fall goes well, 2009 will be the watershed year the year the planet begins to turn its back on one way of doing business and starts to finally embrace a new way.
Does this sound like overstatement? It almost certainly is, at least in the sense that we won’t notice huge shifts immediately. The built infrastructure can’t change overnight, but if the political system manages to actually stick a real price on carbon, then our sense of the future will alter. Anyone building a new house of factory will suddenly have to imagine a world very different from the past or present a future where the design will need to make sense for the world 40 years hence.
The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, but for years, available technology greatly limited scientists interpretation technology greatly limited scientist interpretation of how the billions or neutrons act in concert to create complex behaviors. Recent advances in neuronal recording technology, however, along with the invention of the pentium processor based computer capable of digitizing the data at an a much higher rate than ever before, have enabled brain research to progress at an increasingly rapid pace.
By implanting up to fifty elecrodes, which recorded activity from neutrons in three different brain regions simultaneously, the study was one of the first to compare entie populations of neutrons from multiple areas of the primate brain. As the monkeys performed different visual search tasks, the researches compared the activity of neurons in the parietal and frontal corties. They found that in search trials where the item the monkeys were looking for was extremely obvious so called bottom up processing the parietal cortex reacted first, followed by the frontal cortex. In contrast, when the monkey must actively search for the target so called top down processing the signal flowed in the opposite direction.