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Dr_Vanc_Zosyn t1_itokfp1 wrote

Control of the facial muscles comes from the 7th cranial nerve, which originates in the brainstem. This "primitive" part of the brain is divided in half but not separate hemispheres, and many signals cross the midline there.

Blinking is an easy one since the muscles are symmetric on both sides. Check out how our eyes move together for something really ridiculous.

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CoffeeFox t1_itpkjmx wrote

The stunning amount of work that must have gone into studying this to figure it out to such an extent really makes me respect how someone can pick a specialty and just spend their life going down a rabbit hole.

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mein_liebchen t1_itpvuhj wrote

You just conduct brain surgery without anesthesia. Touch one part of the brain with an electrode and then query the patient, Doctor: What's that do? Patient: I smell rainbows! Do it long enough and you've mapped the brain. No biggy. The purest essence of science is to poke and shock stuff.

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thatswacyo t1_itpx05e wrote

Either that or find people with injuries to specific parts of the brain and see what's wrong with them.

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TheGoblinKingSupreme t1_itq55cm wrote

Yesss like the people with “blindsight” - a lot of people with damage to a particular area of the brain (I forgot the name of the region. I want to say occipital lobe but I don’t know for sure) were consciously blind, but their brain could “see” what they couldn’t unconsciously. We then figured out this part of the brain was like the middleman between the eyes and your conscious self, IIRC.

Absolutely crazy to me. Imagine that. You can’t see anything, but you can TELL something is there. You know how it’s moving. You know how close it is to you. You know how it makes you feel, but you dont know you’re seeing anything.

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turgidNtremulous t1_itrkinf wrote

Yeah, philosophers and neuroscientists have long struggled with the problem of why consciousness exists. But an equally deep problem is why our human consciousness seems to be aware of such a small fraction of what is actually going on in our brains.

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jackduloz t1_itt4gpk wrote

Do you really think you need root privileges, man? You can really hose up a system quick.

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flashpb04 t1_itrjczi wrote

Okay this is tripping me out… could anyone with more knowledge about this expand a little more?

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IrvTheSwirv t1_itrwnxv wrote

See also Hemineglect where someone has absolutely no concept of the left side of anything including the world around them. Refusing even to acknowledge their own left arms or legs.

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flashpb04 t1_itu6t70 wrote

Bruh what?? Continue…..

Also, keep these coming people. I’m a healthcare clinician & have never even heard of these things. Just fascinating.

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TheGoblinKingSupreme t1_itrjr86 wrote

Please reply to me if they do!

I don’t deal a lot with human stuff, I mainly specialise in plants, but the brain has always fascinated me.

That barrier between unconscious and conscious processes has always been so intriguing to me.

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gideonbutsexy t1_itrr516 wrote

Man it's not that easy haha. That's primitive data. To really know what's going on, we try and understand the molecular and cellular processes going on which is honestly like previously said, "going down a rabbit hole"

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Thugluvdoc t1_itpxei7 wrote

Or how we leveraged torturing prisoners of war to learn this : see Nazi Germany

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DaoFerret t1_itq36r9 wrote

Also: Imperial Japan

(asterisk for US Government experiments on its own citizens)

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dgendreau t1_itq81nl wrote

No need for an asterisk. The US government has a long history of conducting unethical medical experiments on unsuspecting US citizens. For example, they conducted the Tuskeege experiments to see what happens long term when you lie to African American soldiers and dont actually treat them for Siphilis. There was also the Manhattan Project offshoot where they secretly injected hospital patients in Rochester NY with plutonium and posed as their primary care physicians to continue study them for the rest of their lives, well into the 1990s.

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FlaminJake t1_itqpdnt wrote

And conducting experiments on OTHER countries citizens while they're in their own country. They hit a French village with a massive dose of LSD, beyond what anyone would take recreationally, before any layman knew what it was. The US is a bastard and always has been.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-10996838

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fogcat5 t1_itrirav wrote

Also, there are a lot of unethical drug experiments the government performed throughout the 50s and 60s maybe other times too. They destroyed people like Kazinsky and then called him mentally insane and a danger to the world justifying even more power and control to keep everyone safe - when their uncontrolled power is the cause of the problem.

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Web-Dude t1_itq6kew wrote

wth imagine comparing what happened in the US to Unit 731 or Josef Mengele. A little perspective please.

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FlaminJake t1_itqsnp2 wrote

Imagine not comparing them. Comparing and contrasting torturous experiments done by Empires sounds like something you should do. While Japan and Germany are definitely worse, the US has committed serious atrocities, ie Tuskegee Airmen and many other experiments done on black people. This is how you get perspective.

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-1KingKRool- t1_itq8qpo wrote

Not to mention people overblow the impact of the records from Unit 731, at a minimum.

They told us nothing we didn’t already know, and bought war criminals pardons from justice.

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imafraidofmuricans t1_itqys8f wrote

If the US is much better then comparing them will show the US in good light and as such it shouldn't be a problem.

Right?

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Gryioup t1_itqw76n wrote

The quiet part is that there are still people out here that think it was fine because: "for the sake of science!"

But turned out that most of the science was bunk because fascist governments won't think twice to corrupt the results for the sake of politics. Additionally the scope of work is focused on crackpot ideas mandated by the best idiots who can climb the ranks (not actual experts)

Who would've guessed that liberties are required for proper science to take place.

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Thugluvdoc t1_itqzzse wrote

Yeah it was eye opening learning about human physiology in medical school, only to learn why we know what happens to the body under extreme cold, heat, stress, etc. if you get really bored, read up on the Civil war experiments about the acid in your stomach and the soldier who got paid for it. There is no right answer - PETA is against mice experiments, human Guinea pigs are horrible, even volunteer humans who knowingly accept the risks are viewed as unethical clinical experiments.

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StatusCity4 t1_itqg4db wrote

I can't help but think about all the suffering some of those studies did, sadly to humans too.

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rtb001 t1_itpyez3 wrote

Many signals cross the midline all over the brain.

The corpus callosum is literally the largest fiber tract in the nervous system, and its job is to link the two cerebral hermitage hemispheres so they can communicate with each other.

But as the fascinating split brain experiments have shown, even if you completely sever the callosum in a fully developed adult brain, it still requires specific conditions to show that the hemispheres are acting much more independently than normal.

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stoicsticks t1_itqitib wrote

I knew a teen who had brain cancer and had the two halves of his brain severed. He couldn't describe the texture of something as smooth or fuzzy unless he physically touched the item. Only then could he say what it was like.

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minstrelMadness t1_itq1sbl wrote

That's incredible! So many different moving parts, just thinking about how they have to work in conjunction is mindblowing--and we usually take it for granted!!

>!But also. Haha MLF!<

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Cenile-Jeezus t1_itro0mm wrote

Also if you get brain damage like a concussion don’t you’re eyes desynchronize?

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ajnozari t1_itsji9a wrote

Also the upper half of the face is innervated by both hemispheres. This means that the signal sent my one hemisphere makes it across. This is partly why an upper motor neuron disease (eg. stroke) doesn’t affect the top half of the face (opposite side preserves the top half’s function) whereas a lower motor neuron disorder (bell’s palsy) affects both upper and lower. As the signals have already joined at that point.

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