Hello everyone! Team MTN hopes 2016 has been going well for your brain and you. As the first post of the year, we’d like to give out our much deliberated list of the top three neuroscience articles from 2015. Our criteria: Bold, unique and beautiful. Nah, just kidding on the last one. We sought research…
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Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled protozoan. Yet, it has the ability to subvert ‘free will’ of its warm-blooded hosts and alter their behavior. It is capable of infecting all mammals—humans included—although the way to true love is through the cat’s stomach. By this one means that this protozoan can only sexually reproduce in feline species. What one does not mean…
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BREAKING: Neuroscientists have finally created a pill that can relieve chronic pain in ten minutes! Chances are, if you are presently suffering from chronic pain and got your hands on the said pill, you’ll be feeling partial or complete relief from pain within ten minutes. It will not matter if the said pill was a…
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Habits – morning jog, reading the newspaper with breakfast, cappuccino at 11:00, another cappuccino at 3:00 – so much of our everydays are crafted from the repetitive choices we make. But not all choices we make or habits we form are innocuous. Neither the choice to have four cups of coffee a day nor the…
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Once you have baked a chocolate cake, hoping for a blueberry cheese cake is not going to take you anywhere. Chocolate cake is all you get (not that chocolate cake is a bad thing at all). A similar notion has existed for neurons. The identities and associated electrical properties of differentiated neurons have been thought to…
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A young man who suffered trauma to the head in a bike accident, can no longer remember his life prior to the accident. An old man with Alzheimer’s has forgotten a large chunk of his life, including that the person sitting in front of him is his own daughter. When a person suffers such memory…
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Think of your favorite festival. Imagine its flavors and smells. Indulge in the gustatory memories. Smile at the memories of shared laughter as you celebrated it with family and friends. If you have done this sincerely, you are feeling a warm and fuzzy gush of positive emotions right about now. If not – well you are just…
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“It speaks to me in a whispered tone; it speaks to me of peace unknown, when smoke rises up blinding my reason.” This is not a scientific rant on smoking. This is not about addiction either. This is about nicotine – the active chemical in tobacco responsible for addiction to all tobacco containing products: cigarettes, snuff,…
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A puff from a lit cigarette in your hand: you feel relaxed, the stress, irritation, anxiety just melting away. It’s an ‘Aah’ moment for you and your brain. Behind the curtains, within 8 seconds the nicotine you smoked is in your brain, disguised as a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine (ACh), binding to receptors meant for the…
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To make moral judgments about a harmful action, we often need to infer the intentions of the doer—did she purposefully ruin my coffee with cinnamon because I did not tip her yesterday or did she mix up the orders by mistake? Fair enough to say that perception of intentionality weighs rather heavily on how we…
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