[photostill]

Research Finds That Electric Fields Help Neurons Fire

"'[T]he brain is enveloped in countless overlapping electric fields, generated by the neural circuits of scores of communicating neurons. ... New work ... suggests that the fields do much more—and that they may, in fact, represent an additional form of neural communication. "In other words," says Anastassiou, the lead author of a paper about the work appearing in the journal Nature Neuroscience (abstract), "while active neurons give rise to extracellular fields, the same fields feed back to the neurons and alter their behavior," even though the neurons are not physically connected—a phenomenon known as ephaptic (or field) coupling. "So far, neural communication has been thought to occur almost entirely via traffic involving synapses, the junctions where one neuron connects to the next one. Our work suggests an additional means of neural communication through the extracellular space independent of synapses."' If this work is replicated, it could reveal that the brain is even more complicated and sophisticated than we thought — and raise new concerns about whether our cellphones and other electronic gizmos are affecting brain activity and memory. This is truly paradigm-busting work."

Source

The original article contains hyperlinks to further data supporting the research into this effect. You will have to go there in order to pick them up because I'm to lazy to embed them here.

It is an understatment to say that this is "paradigm-busting work". I am sure that a group that dedicates itself to AI in it's forms can readily see where this might be the tip of an iceburg leading to actual and true AI.

One of the items that for ages hindered the AI is that in order to use AI properly, the AI must be able to do sight recogintion, not to mention that mobility might be a plus. While sight recognition has come a long ways, it still has a long path ahead of it to reach the same level of the organics it is trying to duplicate.

Same goes for the intelligence factor. No matter how you write the code (and there are some truely amazing ones out) it still falls short of real, honest AI. This might lead to the real mccoy.