![]() While the patients were hooked up to this grid in a hospital and waiting for a seizure to occur, Ries asked if they'd be willing to participate in her research. Before surgery, neurosurgeons monitor their brain activity to figure out which region of the brain is triggering the patients' seizures, which requires the patients to wear a grid of dozens of electrodes placed directly on top of the cortex, the outermost folded layers of the brain. To figure out what happens next in that process, Ries and colleagues asked for help from a population of people in a unique position to lend their brainpower to the problem: patients undergoing brain surgery to reduce their epileptic seizures. When trying to recall a specific word, the brain activates its cluster, significantly reducing the size of the haystack. ![]() How does the brain nearly always find the needle in the haystack? Previous work has revealed that the brain organizes ideas and words into semantically related clusters. Most adults can quickly and effortlessly recall as many as 100,000 regularly used words when prompted, but how the brain accomplishes this has long boggled scientists.
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