Category Archives: Drugs

September 19

Solving the Puzzle of Addiction

According to the United Nations’s World Drug Report of 2024, the number of people who use drugs worldwide had risen to 292 million in 2022, a 20 percent increase over the past 10 years (1). Further more, an estimated 64 million of those people suffer from a substance use disorder (addiction). The study of addiction […]

August 01

Glued to Your Bed

As we know, sleep is essential for the proper functioning of our brain. Although sleep deprivation has never been found to be fatal in humans, a lack of sleep has been linked to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, as well as delirium and hallucinations (1). This is why a lot of research delves into how […]

June 20

When Illusions Help

What can pushing the limits of reality do for you? There has been a lot of interest recently in using the mind-altering properties of a class of drugs known as psychedelics in the treatment of many psychiatric and neurological disorders. Currently, psychedelics are being explored as a novel treatment for depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, […]

August 17

How to Save a Life

How can we help people suffering with suicidal thoughts better?

April 20

This is your brain on drugs: how cannabis products affect the brain and body

How do Cannabis products affect the brain and body?

March 12

Fighting fire with fire: How we can use opioids to fight opioid addiction

JC Gorman The dramatic rise in opioid overdose-related deaths has become a national health emergency. For decades now, countless dollars have been spent trying to both fight opioid substance abuse and also learn how to best treat people who have become reliant on this class of drugs. These therapies come in many forms, from rehab […]

December 22

Fatal Attraction: What is Sex and Love Addiction?

Have you ever been in love? Has it made you do crazy things? Whether it was sending your lover bundles of flowers, stalking their social media (or stalking them in person), or boiling a rabbit in a pot of water, we’ve all been there. We know that love is enthralling. It is potent enough in […]

November 10

Say Cheese: The neuroscience of our devotion to dairy

You might be the kind of person that can’t wait for the “cheese pull” when grabbing a hot slice of pizza, or perhaps you’re the first at the table to suggest a cheese-filled charcuterie board for your appetizer (both of these examples are stemming from personal experience, of course). If you are a fellow cheese […]

October 13

The Wandering Nerve

What do epilepsy, depression, and anxiety all have in common? No, this is not some one-liner joke, there is an actual answer to this question. Could it be that they all could be targeted by a single treatment? To understand how this could be, let’s look into what these disorders are, first. Epilepsy is a […]

July 07

The Forgotten:

Image source: “New Awakenings: The Legacy & Future of Encephalitis Lethargica (EL)” (Sparacin 2012) Some call it “the sleepy-sickness”, others encephalitis lethargica. This mysterious disease, lost to time, bears its colloquial name because those who contracted it entered an “all-enveloping trancelike sleep” (1); and some of those who entered this sleep, did not awake for […]