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Scared Stiff: The Story Behind "Fainting Goats"
Have you ever seen a goat (or any animal, for that matter) do this? Neither had I. But these are the sorts of things that come up at family parties and pique my curiosity. Perhaps the nickname and title of the YouTube video “fainting goats” is a misnomer (as National Geographic pointed out) as the […]
It Seems The Beatles Were on to Something.
The year is 1966. After months of extensive preparation and creative troubleshooting, three scientists studying the brain’s unique split personality eagerly awaited the results of their carefully designed experiment. By placing an electrode into a cat’s corpus callosum, they were hoping to decode the brain’s elusive internal code. What they ended up finding was something […]
What You Don't Know CAN Kill You.
Zombies are terrifying creatures. The most panic-inducing aspect of their completely factual existence among us is that they have a taste for human blood and they will do anything to get to it. Recently, the Zombie Research Society (ZRS) has been attempting to scan (with some difficulty due to the fact that zombies aren’t huge fans […]
Neurotransmission: Now, Soon, L.A.T.E.R., or Never?
Lobsters, Axons, Telephones, and Extracellular Recordings – A look at how neuronal signals can be transmitted differently under certain pharmacological conditions. Neuronal signals are normally transmitted from cell bodies, or somas, to terminals via extensions called axons. At these terminals, connections called synapses are made with other neurons whereby the signals are released via the […]
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
You’re lying on a sandy beach on a hot sunny afternoon, enjoying a few hours of much needed laziness. As you open your eyes and confront the vastness of the ocean in front of you, light of 600nm wavelength hits your retina, kindling an impossibly long cascade of events in your brain: a molecule called […]
Mystical Minds?
Using the human nervous system as a representational medium, are there parts of the universe that are innately unknowable to us- are there realities that we can experience but not objectively measure? Is spirituality real, or a man-made delusion to justify ambiguous emotions and guide behavior? Is consciousness an emergent property or does it extend […]
Neither free nor completely determined
Free will is a hackneyed topic. Science seems to be telling us that free will doesn’t exist because behavior is governed by the brain and the brain operates on physical rules of cause and effect. There is no such thing as uncaused cause, which free will requires. For some people this is an unbearable notion; […]
What the Freud is Up with Dreams?
Ranging from the Eastern Mediterranean in the 7th century, to China in the 16th century, and finally to Europe in the 17th century, dream interpretation has been viewed as a decryption of supernatural communications and symbolic messages. Sigmund Freud, the academically (in)famous founder of the field of psychoanalysis, whole-heartedly supported the hypothesis that dreams contain […]
Robert Sapolsky – Individual Differences
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