Scientists decided to find out how specialized the neurons are. First, they used a bit of addition and then a bit of subtraction. And they found the specialization is quite absurd - the human brain has special neurons for both.
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Five women and four men had electrodes implanted into their brains. The experimental subjects sometimes suffer from epileptic seizures. In this case, thin wires run into the patient’s temporal lobe to find where the seizures go and where. If the critical area can be localized there is a chance that they can be completely prevented or at the very least prevent the seizure from applying to the full body. A precisely localized surgery is used to achieve this.
As scientists tend to do, after entering the probes into the brain the scientists asked various questions. This is done so they can check whether they reached the correct area and not a place where it could leave the patient with unexpected consequences.
The probes used are precise enough that we can measure the activity of individual neurons with them. This allowed the scientists to discover that some of the neurons were active only when the patient was doing addition and others only when doing subtraction.
The fact that this is truly a specialization and not just a mistake was confirmed by changing the trivial mathematical problem. The results show that it doesn’t matter whether there was a plus or minus used in the equation, whether they saw it in writing, or whether they were asked verbally. Adding 5 and 3 together activated the neurons specialized for addition and removing 4 from 7 activated the subtraction neurons.
What needs to be added is that the scientist needed a bit of help to figure this out. The deciphering of the neural activity was done by an AI. First, the scientists told the AI whether the person is solving addition or subtraction but once the algorithm did this it was capable of easily knowing what kind of mathematical operation is taking place.
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