Neuroamer

Latest on Covid Origins A recent FOIA request by Right To Know’s Emily Kopp yielded new information about Project Defuse, a DARPA grant proposal from 2018 to study bat-borne Coronaviruses that included Wuhan Institute of Virology researcher Shi Zhengli. The newly released documents, show collaborators’ internal notes on drafts of the grant proposal, which yielded two small revelations: - The gran…

Why is Everyone Talking About the ‘Glutide’ Drugs as a Treatment for Obesity? Semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) is part of a class of drugs that mimic the action of the peptide GLP-1, a hormone that’s secreted from the small intestine in response to food. GLP-1 and drugs that mimic it’s actions like the ‘glutides’ have many actions throughout the body, but the most important direct effects are thought…

Will new antivirals bring us into a new phase of covid risk-mitigation and effectively end the pandemic? As I lay on my couch, shirtless and cold but sweating from my first Covid booster shot, I got a push notification about a Wired article: New Covid Drugs Are Here — and They Could Change the Pandemic The article highlights the benefits these drugs could bring to the third world, where the logis…

JAMA Launches Podcast App: What’s the future of medical education? The Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, is launching a podcast app designed to help doctors to listen to educational content and take quizzes on what they learn. By listening to these podcasts and taking the accompanying quizzes, medical professionals could earn Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits, which a…

(AP Photo/Mark Tenally) On Saturday, Nats batter Adrian Sanchez turned in towards a pitch as he attempted to bunt. But the 96-mph pitch headed straight for him, and the baseball struck him in the chest. He clutched his chest and collapsed to the ground where he remained for several minutes. An athletic trainer ran over, […]

Just listened to the neuroscientist, Robert Sapolsky, talk about free will on Sam Harris’s podcast. Neither of them believe in free will and neither do I. It started in high school with a thought experiment: if you rewound your life and woke up again this morning with no memory of what had happened today, would you […]

Etymologically, schizophrenia comes from Greek skhizein and phren mind, so literally means “split mind,” and in popular culture, the term ‘schizophrenic,’ is often is used to refer to someone with multiple personalities.  However, schizophrenia has nothing to do with multiple personalities, instead it refers to a chronic mental health disorder with no cure that can […]

Exposure to toxic metals, like lead, have been linked to intellectual disability, and language, and behavioral problems, but the results of studies looking at whether toxic metals influence Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have been mixed. Other metals like manganese and zinc are essential minerals important for proper development and health. Until now, one of the […]

The strong and simultaneous activation of both branches the autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic, is known as ‘autonomic conflict.’ In the cartoonish intro-biology view of the body, the sympathetic system fight or flight is an accelerator, the parasympathetic is pumping the breaks. (I always used to think parasympathetic = paramedics = ’rest and recover’.) […]

When Chris Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University, was trying to choose a textbook for his introductory psychology course, he realized his own field of study, video game violence was being misportrayed in some textbooks. “The data isn’t consistent or clear,” said Fergusen, but textbooks were picking sides and trying to portray it like it […]

First off, if you’re experiencing the worst headache of your life, please stop reading and head to an emergency room, especially if it’s onset was sudden. Alright, moving on: I’ll start with a personal story and get to the studies, below. Feel free to skip ahead. I was thirteen, in English class and struggling to […]

Circuit Neuroscience Recently, research into psychiatric disease has made great strides, but continued progress may require unpopular and ethically murky research. Joshua Gordon, the new director of the National Institutes of Mental Health writes in this month’s Nature Neuroscience: “At this unique and exciting time for psychiatry, novel therapies for individuals with mental illnesses seem just a…

While researching last week’s post on the Best popular neuroscience books, I came upon many people asking: Which is the best neuroscience textbook? Is there any consensus? I looked up the top neuroscience graduate programs in the U.S.[1] and found syllabi from introductory neuroscience classes taught at these universities. Here’s a couple tables summarizing the textbooks being […]

It was a book that originally piqued my interest in neuroscience and in the ten years I’ve studied neuro, what I’ve learned from books has stuck with me longer than what I’ve learned in classes, lectures, conferences. Why do books stick with us? Perhaps well-written books are crafted for the structure of our minds—connecting newly […]

Step aside, Cesar Millan—these days when you want to know what the dog really saw, ask a scientist, not a Dog Whisperer. While studies of domestic dogs (Canis familiaris) have long been fundamental to neuroscience—it was Pavlov’s dog after all that drooled when it heard that bell—dog research is undergoing a renaissance due to advances in genetic […]

I love improv comedy because of its authenticity. You might ask me, how can a dramatic form where the performers are literally making everything up as they go possibly be authentic? To that I would say, “Yes, and… Fuck, I really should’ve thought that one through.” I’ve always been a fan of comedy, but five […]

“Autism is about having a pure heart and being very sensitive… It is about finding a way to survive in an overwhelming, confusing world… It is about developing differently, in a different pace and with different leaps,” Trisha Van Berkel. How do genes—DNA, these physical atoms: carbons, hydrogens, and nitrogens—influence our subjective experience of consciousness? And […]

I wasn’t suicidal — I was just curious what would happen if I labeled my video ‘suicide.’ Surely, the live-streaming app, that had months before been bought by the $10 billion dollar company Twitter, must’ve realized someone would do this. I imagined a notification would pop up, advising me who to call if I needed help, […]

“We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”―Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club After Fight Club was published in 1996, our dreams have further devolved and divorced themselves from […]

A recent Invisibilia episode discusses frames of reference—the frames we use to interpret our world—and how our own frame of reference can clash with that of others, even our own family. For immigrants and their children, differences in culture, generation, class, and historical context lead to dramatically different frames of reference—after all what is a […]