Nanotechnology has numerous potential applications, many of which are relevant to this book. But for now we’ll confine our attention to the business of brain activity mapping. At the nano-scale, even the soma of a neuron, whose characteristic size is a few millionths of a meter, looks big. So we can imagine creating swarms of nano-scale robots capable of swimming freely in the brain’s network of blood vessels, each one then attaching itself like a limpet to the membrane of a neuron or close to a synapse.4 There it would sit, sensing the neuron’s fluctuating membrane potential or detecting
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