GEN-ERIC News

The area of the brain that processes sounds entering the ears also appears to process stimulus entering the eyes, providing a novel explanation for why many viewers believe that ventriloquists have thrown their voices to the mouths of their dummies. More generally, these findings from Duke University Medical Center offer new insights into how the brain takes in and assembles a multitude of stimuli from the outside world. By studying monkeys, the researchers found that auditory and visual information is processed together before the combined signals make it to the brain’s cortex, the analytical portion of the brain that assembles the stimuli from all the senses into coherent thoughts. “The prevailing wisdom among brain scientists has been that each of the five senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste – is governed by its own corresponding region of the brain,” said Jennifer Groh, Ph.D., a neurobiologist in Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “The view has been that each of these areas processes the information separately and sends that information to the cortex, which puts it all together at the end. “Now, we are beginning to appreciate that it’s not that simple,” Groh continued. “Our results show that there are interactions between the sensory pathways that occur very early in the process, which implies that the integration of the different senses may be a more primitive process and one not requiring high-level brain functioning.” The results of Groh’s experiments were published early online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bacterium that can eat sugar or sludge; must be team player or electrochemically active; ability to survive without oxygen, a plus. Thus might read the bacterial “job description” posted by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Washington University (WU) scientists, who are collaborating on ways to make microbial fuel cells more efficient and practical. According to Mike Cotta, who leads the ARS Fermentation Biotechnology Research Unit, Peoria, Ill., the project with WU arose from a mutual interest in developing sustainable methods of producing energy that could diminish U.S. reliance on crude oil. Cotta’s team specializes in using bacteria, yeasts or other microorganisms inside bioreactors to do work, such as ferment grain sugars into fuel ethanol. At WU in St. Louis, Mo., assistant professor Lars Angenent is investigating fuel cell systems that use mixtures of bacteria to treat organic wastewater and catalyze the release of electrons and protons, which then can be used to produce electricity or hydrogen fuel.