When most people think of dopamine, they think of things that can get you high. Things that feel good. Cocaine. Sex. Food. We imagine floods of dopamine in our brains as the pleasurable feelings take hold. As more and more media outlets cover neuroscience, we get the idea that serotonin means happiness, but dopamine means…pleasure. […]
A travelogue of Sci’s recent trip to Japan, complete with photos and a record of all the amazing food I managed to go through. Comes with a bonus side of jetlag!!
YES, Sci spent her vacation in JAPAN!!! And enough of you asked me to blog about it that I’m going to comply. Hopefully it will only be a 3-4 part series (yeah, long trip), but we’ll see how the pictures go! I actually keep travel logs every time I go somewhere, and what you’ll be […]
Sci is BACK from her rather well earned vacation (or at least, I think it was well earned. You all are welcome to think I’m slackin’ if you so choose). And something happened in my absence. This. YES. Sci has started a blog over at Scientific American! I’ll be blogging at The Scicurious Brain once […]
It’s a Holiday in the USA! Have fireworks. 🙂
I was very pleased to run across this paper a few weeks ago. I answer a LOT of questions about psychiatric drugs (on blog and IRL), and one of the most frequent ones is “DO antidepressants hurt sexual activity?” and “HOW?” As for whether they DO, well, yes. The most popular class of antidepressants, the […]
Sci loves Portal. I think it’s a magnificently clever game, and Portal 2 is the in the same vein. I love the songs, I love the humor, and I love the concept (puzzle solving with a giant gun! That makes portals!), and I DESPERATELY want to play. I can’t. Sci, not unlike many people on […]
Some of you are aware that I have a really great tattoo. I love it. It’s interesting, it’s personal, it’s artistic. In fact, it’s SO interesting that I get comments on it every day. On any given day when it’s exposed, I will get an average of four (low end 1, high end 20) people […]
Sci got the fodder for this week’s Friday Weird Science via Anne Jefferson of the Highly Allocthonous blog. Apparently Anne recently suffered a doozy of an episode of…pine nut mouth. What, you’ve never heard of it? Neither had I until this came along last week. But it’s a real phenomenon, and apparently a really disgusting […]
Today we move on in our tour of the cranial nerves to another nerve that is basically responsible for an entire system. In fact, it’s an overachiever…and does TWO. We’ve had the olfactory and the optic, and now, we welcome the vestibulocochlear, which does both auditory AND your sense of balance. The auditory system is […]