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Trippy mushrooms
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Users of magic mushrooms often report altered states of consciousness and a synesthesia-like melding of the senses. Now, scientists may have figured out why: Psilocybin changes the brain’s wiring, creating a hyperconnected brain that contains links between regions that don’t normally communicate with each other. Communication between brain networks in people given psilocybin (right) or a non-psychedelic compound (left). ...
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6009 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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Want to become a brain surgeon? Better get used to this
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Watch as a neurosurgeon opens up a patient's skull and clears the clotted blood from the surface of her brain. We probably don't have to tell you that this is extremely graphic footage, but - you've been warned.
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5420 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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Good bacteria helps to defend your brain
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The microbes that live in your body outnumber your cells 10 to one. Recent studies suggest these tiny organisms help us digest food and maintain our immune system. Now, researchers have discovered yet another way microbes keep us healthy: They are needed for closing the blood-brain barrier, a molecular fence that shuts out pathogens and molecules that could harm the brain.
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duddy |
9 years ago |
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duddy |
9 years ago |
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Is Down Syndrome exclusive to humans?
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Kenny is a white tiger that was ‘selectively’ inbred while in captivity in the United States. As zoos and exotic pet stores along with consumers have increased the demand for white tigers, breeders have attempted to recreate the ideal white tiger - large snout, blue eyes, white fur - by relying on a limited pool of white tigers that are in captivity. The result? With such a limited gene pool, white tigers are born with an astoundingly high rate of deformities and health issues. For example, Kenny is mentally retarded, has significant physical limitations, and is considered the first tiger with down syndrome. The 3 year-old male orangutan shown above also has characteristics that are similar to people with Down syndrome. It is seen from his h ...
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9119 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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duddy |
9 years ago |
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duddy |
9 years ago |
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16199 |
duddy |
9 years ago |
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12992 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
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What's it like to live with prosopometamorphopsia
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In July 2011, a 52-year-old woman presented at a psychiatric clinic in the Netherlands reported that for her entire life she’d seen multiple peoples’ faces change into dragon-like faces. She was suffering from what is known as prosopometamorphopsia; a psychiatric disorder in which faces appear distorted. What made matters worse, researchers couldn’t work out what was causing this to occur. Various brain scans including MRI, electroencephalogram, and neurological examinations, as well as blood tests were all normal. One area of the brain that might be the cause is the fusiform gyrus, which is the part of our face recognition circuitry. The fusiform gyrus is located in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex, and damage to it can make people ha ...
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duddy |
8 years ago |
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Why do our eyes move when we're dreaming?
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Scientists have worked out why your eyes move when you’re dreaming. Scientists have known for decades that the rapid eye movements (REMs) that occur during sleep signal that we’re dreaming, but what do the individual eye motions really represent? It’s long been hypothesised that each movement of the eye reflects new visual information in our dreams, and now for the first time researchers have demonstrated that this is actually the case. According to a new study by researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel, each flick of the eye that occurs during REM sleep accompanies the introduction of a new image in our dream, with the movement essentially acting like a reset function between individual dream "snapshots". Source: http://www.sciencealer ...
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3090 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
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Why do drugs like MDMA make you feel happy?
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This video explains it quite well. The key hormone in question is serotonin. Serotonin is known to play a role in depression. Low serotonin levels are believed to be the reason for depression and associated symptoms of anxiety, apathy, fear, feelings of worthlessness, insomnia and fatigue. The opposite is true when a high-level of serotonin is present, you feel jovial and enthusiastic. MDMA promotes the formation of this hormone. ...
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11028 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
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One-eyed pigeons are terrible with directions
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When homing pigeons fly home they rely on smells, magnetic fields, and vision to guide their way. But how important visual memory is for pigeons has long remained a mystery. According to a new study, pigeons that learned their way home with a blocked left eye couldn’t repeat the same journey when they wore a patch over their right eye, and vice versa. Instead, they flew slightly off course, following more of a curve than a straight line. Since birds lack a corpus callosum, this suggests that a birds’ lack of this key neural structure greatly affects how pigeons are able to find their way home. Source: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/282/1816/20151957 ...
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9087 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
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Sweet tooth explained
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Someone who greatly enjoys sweet foods is said to have a "sweet tooth." Experimental evidence now shows us that eating sweets forms memories that may control eating habits. In other words, people may enjoy eating sweets because the taste is correlated with positive memories. The findings, published online in the journal Hippocampus, show that neurons in the dorsal hippocampus, the part of the brain that is critical for episodic memory, are activated by consuming sweets. Episodic memory is the memory of autobiographical events experienced at a particular time and place. In the study, a meal consisting of a sweetened solution, either sucrose or saccharin, significantly increased the expression of the synaptic plasticity marker called activity ...
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6975 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
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Mad honey
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Mad honey is a rare hallucinogenic honey that is made by the Giant Bee of Himalayas ( Apis dorsata laboriosa) in Nepal. The bee lives and nests at altitudes between 2 500 and 3 000 meters, where it builds very large nests under overhangs on the south-western faces of vertical cliffs. The honey possesses hallucinogenic properties because it contains an ingredient from rhododendron nectar called grayanotoxin - a natural neurotoxin that, even in small quantities, brings on light-headedness and hallucinations. Since it is difficult to harvest and has special properties, this kind of honey is expensive and sells for about five times the price of normal honey in the foreign market. So, the honey hunters take absurd risks to get the honey from over ...
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7856 |
duddy |
8 years ago |
