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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Brain blackout is kind of a dramatic word. I’m pretty sure the article is trying to refer to cortical spreading depression.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/nrneurol.2013.192

    This is a wave of decreased activity going across the brain. It’s not the whole brain though, just a portion, and it tends to happen more often in the posterior brain than anterior. That’s why visual and other sensory auras (posterior brain) auras are more common than motor/weakness auras (anterior brain). The visual aura itself is the spreading wave of decreased activity going across the brain. It happens in primary visual cortex, primarily dealing with lines and colors. Visual space is represented radially on the brain, so it can often be circular. The “fortifications” or lines on the edges some people see come from the fact that it’s neurons that deal with line detection. Pain usually follows shortly after, but we aren’t exactly sure how that works, and this article was posing a possible mechanism to help link these. The main bulk of the visual aura where it’s grey, blurry, and indistinct is the decreased activity itself in the visual cortex. The area can get larger as the wave spreads.

    Deja vu or jamais vu have been reported with migraines, though that’s a very rare aura in comparison. It’s all depending on what parts of the brain are involved with the cortical spreading depression for that migraine aura for that person in terms of what symptom will happen. Deja vu would be more temporal lobe. Temporal lobe is the most common localization for focal epilepsies. So deja vu as a symptom of a neurologic disease would more commonly be seen with seizures (focal seizures are sometimes called auras too, which gets confusing but are inherently different from what is happening in a migraine). But don’t worry, most deja vu is nothing to worry about.















  • From the applications section of the Wikipedia article on quantum entanglement:

    Entanglement has many applications in quantum information theory. With the aid of entanglement, otherwise impossible tasks may be achieved.

    Among the best-known applications of entanglement are superdense coding and quantum teleportation.[85]

    Most researchers believe that entanglement is necessary to realize quantum computing (although this is disputed by some).[86]

    Entanglement is used in some protocols of quantum cryptography,[87][88] but to prove the security of quantum key distribution (QKD) under standard assumptions does not require entanglement.[89] However, the device independent security of QKD is shown exploiting entanglement between the communication partners.[90]

    A lot of Sci Fi and other popular media likes to misconstrue quantum entanglement as allowing for faster than light communication so that they can have faster than light communication in their story, often for narrative purposes to make their galaxy spanning epic possible on a human time scale. But as far as we know, faster than light communication is impossible. It doesn’t mean quantum entanglement is useless or not an important scientific finding though.