Sci is at SciAm blogs today, with a brand new study on singing and heart rate. Can singing affect your heart rate? How? And why? The study is interesting, but there’s a lot of caution to be taken with it. Head over and check it out.
Sci is at SciAm blogs today, with a brand new study on singing and heart rate. Can singing affect your heart rate? How? And why? The study is interesting, but there’s a lot of caution to be taken with it. Head over and check it out.
I’m sure everyone has heard that activities like Sudoku and doing lots of math can help maintain your cognitive function as you age. This is because these activities require increased “cognitive load”, they are hard to do and therefore take more cognitive effort. Doing this as you age (and preferably starting long before you age) […]
Sci has a piece over at Slate today, asking “What is dopamine?” We often hear about dopamine being motivation, lust, love, reward, addiction. Is it any, or all of these things? The answer is much more complicated, and much, MUCH more interested. Head over and check it out!
…well have you ever ASKED it? Maybe it is more of a Picasso type of mouse. This seems like a completely absurd question. After all, art is thought to be one of the highest of the human endeavors, making things of beauty may be one of the things that makes us the species that we […]
Sci is at SciAm blogs today, asking about perfect pitch. Is perfect pitch really perfect? Probably not! It turns out that you can mess with people with perfect pitch, without them even being aware of it. Head over and check it out!
Sci is at SciAm blogs today, looking at another OCD study (the second in two weeks!). This one is looking at how optogenetics can break a repetitive habit. What does it mean? What is the circuit? Head over and check it out!
What do the overconsumption of food and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) have in common? At first, this sounds like a trick question. But deep in the brain, the molecules underlying our behavior may come together for these two conditions. The first is MC4R, a receptor for melanocortin. It binds hormones and affects feeding behavior, mutations in […]
Sci is at SciAm Blogs today, covering a study that combats the effects of early life stress using adenosine 2A antagonists. Why did this study catch my eye? Caffeine is an adenosine 2A antagonist…head over and check it out.
I started piano lessons when I was 4-5 years old. I remember years of piano teachers, forced half hours on the piano, and kicking around my piano teacher’s house waiting for my brother to finish his half hour. By the time I entered middle school and took up band instead, we kids were able to […]
Sci is at SciAm Blogs today, wondering why ECT works to treat depression. The truth is, we still don’t know. But today’s study is looking at 5-HT1A receptors, and what role they have to play. Head over and check it out.