Dr. Michael Kilgard

But the brain being plastic means if nobody high frequency ever happens and low frequency things keep happening, your brain is going to shift from the high frequencies to the mid frequencies.

And you're now going to end up with too many neurons in the mid frequencies.

Right at the edge of where you can hear, you get too many neurons.

The same thing happens after an amputation.

So you end up with too many neurons responding to the stump because the hand's not there anymore.

So if the hand's not there anymore, I'm not going to keep doing that.

The neurons find something else to do, just like smart little neurons that they are.

The problem is if you exceed some threshold, if I take this microphone and put it next to a speaker, you'll get feedback.

And because the number one input to neurons in the cortex are other neurons in the cortex,

Not the outside world.

Neurons in the brain mostly talk to themselves, not the world.

There's very few neurons in the eye.

You know this, but most people are surprised.

You don't have megapixels of resolution.

You've got kind of a smallish number.

But you're moving around and you're using and sampling.

Here we have a situation where...

The way the brain is processing is over-focused, and you start to get oscillations.

The neurons start to fire together.

They start to wire together.