What Loneliness Looks Like in the Brain
Loneliness is recognizable in brain maps that capture levels of closeness with others and feelings of similarity to or difference from others.
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Cooking, Evolution, and Brain Growth
Cooking establishes the difference between animals and people. In fact, we’re not the only social animals that sit down to eat together, but we are the only ones who cook. But how is cooking linked to human brain’s growth and evolution? This is a video from Dr. Joe Hanson’s It’s Okay To Be Smart series. Cooking helped humans strengthen social bonds and cooperation. Although our brain uses one-fifth of the calories that we eat, we spend only 5 percent of our daily lives eating, while Chimpanzees and Gorillas spend more than half…
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A Fly Cruises the Smell Arena for Science
By Amanda Alvarez @neuroamanda Banana essence. Apple cider vinegar. Almond jelly dessert. Mentsuyu. These are just some of the smells tested on flies in Hokto Kazama’s lab—you might recognize the last one as the soy sauce-based broth in noodle soup. These smells and more are processed in a part of the fly brain only slightly bigger than half the width of a human hair. (We’re talking about fruit flies here, not house flies, so everything is even smaller than you imagined.) What goes on in the antennal lobe, as it’s…
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How and Why Do Brain Cells Die?
By Norman Rusin @normanrusin Chaining Proteins May Free Brain Cells from Disease How did the king of Corinth, Sisyphus, outwit the god of death, Thanatos? By using the god’s own chains. When it was Sisyphus’s time to die, Zeus ordered Thanatos to chain Sisyphus up in Tartarus, the kingdom of the dead. King Sisyphus slyly asked Thanatos to demonstrate how the chains worked. As Thanatos was granting him his wish, Sisyphus seized the opportunity and trapped Thanatos in the chains instead. Once the god of death was bound by the…
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Sleep Makes Memories More Accessible, Vivid
You may have heard that sleeping protects memories from being forgotten. According to new research, however, sleep can also make those memories easier to access. The results of a new study from the University of Exeter and the Basque Centre for Cognition, Brain and Language suggest that after sleep we are more likely to recall facts we could not remember before. The beneficial impact of sleep on memory is well established, and the act of sleeping is known to help us remember the things that we did, or heard, the…
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Can Brainprints Replace Passwords?
By Kate S. How many passwords do you keep track of? How many have you forgotten? According to researchers from Binghamton University, remembering lots of complicated codes may one day be a thing of the past. The unique way your brain responds to certain words could be used to replace passwords. Studying Brain Biometrics The research team monitored the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms, such as FBI and DVD. They recorded the brain’s reaction to each group of letters, focusing on the…
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Biologist Explains How We Learn to Catch
By Kate S. If you’ve ever played baseball or football and fumbled a catch, then this article is for you. A biologist has come up with a hypothesis of the way in which our brains learn to time a catch or a throw, and it has to do with how our brains process temporal information. Daya Gupta, biologist and professor at Camden County College, USA, used to fumble the ball on the cricket field as a kid, so he turned his fumbles into answers. Now, with input from 60 researchers…
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