It's all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization.

Now this cortical folding presents a significant challenge for interpreting surface electrical impulses.

Now actually we've looked in several different cortical areas in the monkey learning this task.

Callus formation is slower in adults than in children, and in cortical bones than in cancellous bones.

There are 15 or 20 cortical areas that are changed specifically when you learn a simple skill like this.

So for example we can look to the cortical area that represents input that's controlling the posture of the monkey.

We look in cortical areas that control specific movements, and the sequences of movements that are required in the behavior, and so forth.

But actually if you look at melody, what you find is that there's very little cortical activity in implant users compared with normal hearing controls.

In other words there is still a single, simple representation of the fingertips in this most organized of cortical areas of the surface of the skin of the body.

It's not good for our physical health and it sends signals to the brain that begin to shut down the higher perceptual centers in our brain, called cortical inhibition.

And there's actually a cortical arousal we're looking at, because guys have been with guys in teams, in clubs, in gangs, in fraternities, especially in the military, and then in pubs.

These efforts are the leading candidate for the first human trials on a broad scale for motor cortical implants to help quadriplegic or locked in patients communicate with the outside world.

That says to me, at least in rats and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture that play may be pretty important for our survival.

That says to me, at least in rats and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture that play may be pretty important for our survival.

And it's important, if you try to model this, you can think about normal development as a loss of cortical mass, loss of cortical gray matter, and what's happening in schizophrenia is that you overshoot that mark, and at some point, when you overshoot, you cross a threshold, and it's that threshold where we say, this is a person who has this disease, because they have the behavioral symptoms of hallucinations and delusions.

This evolving area of neuroscience offers a neurochemist a micro macro connection between the analysis of organic compounds active in the nervous system and neural processes such as cortical plasticity, neurogenesis and neural differentiation.

However, the rodent studies were poorly focused on the behavioral end, and Ron Frostig and Daniel Polley (1999, 2004) identified behavioral manipulations as causing a substantial impact on the cortical plasticity in that system.

This theory of motor action is based on the organization of cortical columns, which progressively integrate from simple sensory input into a complex afferent signals, or from complex motor programs to simple controls for each muscle fiber in efferent signals, forming a similar hierarchical structure.

And what was interesting was that in this one region, the 50 year old meditators had the same amount of cortex as the 25 year olds, suggesting that meditation practice may actually slow down or prevent the natural age related decline in cortical structure.