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Science 3 April 1998:
Vol. 280. no. 5360, p. 37
DOI: 10.1126/science.280.5360.37
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Research News

NEUROSCIENCE:
Magnetic Brain Imaging Traces a Stairway to Memory

James Glanz

LOS ANGELES--In work presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society here 2 weeks ago, researchers monitoring the subtle magnetic fields that sprout from the skull were able to watch how neuronal firing marched along the entire visual pathway--the first time that's been done for the human brain. The result was a motion picture of the neural processing of a visual stimulus--and an unexpected discovery: In every location where there is a response to a visual stimulus, it establishes a memory. The data imply that each site has a distinct "forgetting time," ranging from tenths of a second in the primary visual cortex--the first stage of raw processing--to as long as 30 seconds farther downstream.

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)