Tagged: Dopamine
Mothers Eating Their Babies? – No, It’s Not Cannibalism…
Spaghetti and Babies Anyone?
If you’ve ever seen someone with a baby, chances are you’ve heard them say something along the lines of “You’re so cute; I could just eat you up!”
Well a recent article published in Frontiers in Psychology by a research team at the Technische Universität of Dresden, Germany shows there may be a link between an infant’s smell and a female’s response, depending on the status of the female. Scientists have studied the connection between olfactory signals and the bond between a mother and her infant in several non-human mammal species. However, up until now, the research performed on mother-infant bonding in humans has only ever explored the visual and auditory senses.
What they did:
A total of 30 women were tested. Fifteen of the women had given birth for the first time three to six weeks prior to the experiment (primiparous). The other 15 women had never given birth (nulliparous). To obtain the sample odors, 18 infants each wore a T-shirt for two nights postpartum. The shirts were then placed in plastic bags and frozen to keep the odor unaltered. During the experiment, each woman was exposed to both “odorless” air and the odors of two different infants; primiparous women were never exposed to their own baby’s odor. The women were asked to rate the odor on intensity, familiarity, and pleasantness, though none of the participants were aware of what the odor stimulus was. As the women processed the different odors, an fMRI machine scanned their brain.
Cupidity of Commodity
WARNING: the following article features sentences written either by professionals or under the supervision of professionals. Accordingly, Matt and the producers must insist that no one attempt to recreate or re-enact any sentence or thought described in this article.
Personal Note from the Producers: Don't feed into the character Matt creates, he truly is a good person. #NWTS
Cue the Pink Floyd...
Boom boom ba boom boom boom ching ching guitar riff...."MONEY!"
What do you want? What do you need? Food? Water? Shelter? Sure, sure, yes maybe, but what do you want? Dream bigger, you're thinking too realistically! Stop limiting yourself, open up! Close your eyes, relax, paint the picture how you see it. Don't tell me, just visualize it, taste it, feel it! C'mon man, it's in there somewhere! Yes Yes, exactly bottle up all those 'it's not gonna happen' or 'yeah right' moments you experienced and strangle the life out of them! You want the Arancio Argos Lamborghini Aventador LP 700-4 with the matte wheels to match, okay. You liked that bachelor pad in Phuket didn't you? The one with the wrap around balcony, snug love seat, black leather couch, gourmet kitchen, his/her bathrooms...yeah that's the one. But how? That's impossible right? How do you expect to reward yourself with such prodigal riches at such a young age? Who are you trying to follow? Me: Floyd "Money" Mayweather, Adrien Broner, Scott Disick, Lavish P! Because we're all rich peasants! If you can't afford to roll with the crew baby, then you're merely a campesino (shout out to to the Spanish readers). We get everything we want! There ain't no morality in this [bleep]! We might as well call ourselves the seven deadly sins! We take pride in our beliefs, feed off of your envy, consume more than we require, lust in the beauty of those we surround ourselves with, avoid physical labor, laugh at your anger, and most importantly: ignore the realm of the spiritual because its not worth a dime! Now, I love me some greed in the morning, especially served with a bowl of lucky charms. But is the idea of greed more innate than we think it is? Are the moral perceptions of greed and neuroscience more intertwined than we think? Shall we...
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 aide of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters. Many still believe that axons are reliable conductors of these signals.
However, with several years’ worth of experiments, scientists have questioned the fidelity of axonal conduction. They’ve realized that axons do not work like telephones. While telephones and axons may both have buttons – at the terminals in axons – only telephones faithfully conduct signals. And only telephones ring aloud and send messages to voicemail…
In any case, neuronal signals, unlike telephone signals, can change along their paths. Moreover, the pre-synaptic neuron may communicate a different message from the one originally sent from the soma to the synapse with the post-synaptic cell. Researchers at the lab I’ve been working at this summer, the Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience, have focused on the role of neuromodulation in signal transmission along axons, particularly by the well-known neurotransmitter – dopamine. More
Vineyard Brains
Going on vacation with my family for thirteen days was both exciting and daunting. The West Coast adventure was extremely appealing and I couldn’t wait to see the Grand Canyon, explore Yosemite National Park, and drive a convertible down the Pacific Coast Highway. But where was I going to get my brain fix? The Scientific American issue I bought for the flight to Phoenix wasn’t doing it for me. Some hope was gained at The Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum in San Francisco that managed to convince my thirteen-year-old sister that neuroscience might be almost potentially cool, but it wasn’t until a trip to Sonoma County that my curiosity was finally piqued.
Tiger the horse and I were riding along on a vineyard tour and I was talking to the tour guide about school. I’ve got yet another new response to “I’m studying neuroscience”: the tour guide told me about his son’s mysterious mental illness that may or may not be schizophrenia and we rode through wine country discussing psychiatrists, Thorazine, thought disorders and SSRIs. All in all, a good day.
This conversation got me wondering about the kinds of challenges psychologists and psychiatrists face when having to diagnose patients with schizophrenia. All the clinicians have to go on are whatever behavioral abnormalities make themselves apparent. But how do you weed out schizophrenia from other kinds of psychosis (some of which may respond to the typical treatment for schizophrenia)? More
