Category Archives: Pop Culture

Via press.princeton.edu October 27

NeuWrite Reads: Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? by Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek

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If you’ve come to our website via Google, there’s a good chance it’s because you wanted to know about zombies.  The search term that brings the most people to our site by far is “are zombies real?”.  Ashley’s post is an awesome primer on real-life zombies, but for those of you who want to go […]

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September 04

NeuWrite Reads: “Lock In” by John Scalzi

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Editor’s Note: This is the first in an occasional series where NeuWriters review fiction and nonfiction books about the brain. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about locked-in syndrome, a rare and dramatic disorder in which a stroke or other traumatic event affects the brain stem and leaves the patient completely paralyzed but […]

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July 24

Lucy’s Brain: Use it or lose it

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With the Lucy movie coming out, we’ve been really curious here at NeuWrite about what marvelous new life skills Scarlett Johansson will accrue, now that she can use more than 10% of her brain. As forward-thinking neuroscientists, we’ve been speculating: what would Lucy be able to do with such incredible and unprecedented brain power? The […]

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July 04

Does Tourette’s Syndrome help Tim Howard?

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For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past fortnight, the FIFA World Cup has been on. Unfortunately the US Men’s team was knocked out by Belgium in extra time on Tuesday, but if one man can hold his head high it is Tim Howard. The US goalkeeper made a […]

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June 19

Locked In Syndrome: Facing My Nightmare

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You always hear about “medical student syndrome,” where first year med students start diagnosing themselves with all of the diseases they learn about, becoming temporary hypochondriacs.  They don’t tell you that the same fear can set in during graduate school.  Ever since I started my Ph.D, I’ve diagnosed myself with more than a few of […]

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June 05

LoveConnectome

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We’re coming up on finals week here at UCSD, so we thought we’d take this week off to get our studying done.  In the meantime, please enjoy this video made by the first year Neuroscience graduate students.  Fans of our “Get Data” video should make sure to fast forward to 4:29 to enjoy more of […]

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May 08

Neurons, Footballs, and the Draft! Oh my!

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Tonight, a few hundred football players will be chosen by one of the 32 teams of the National Football League in the hopes of making millions of dollars and establishing their names in the glory of NFL history. Yet only a tiny fraction of college football players, 1.6%, and an even smaller fraction of high school […]

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April 03

Talkin’ 2 Myself: Eminem and the Science of Inner Speech

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The other day, I was listening to Eminem’s “Talkin’ 2 Myself,” and I started thinking about the therapeutic effects of talking to oneself (coincidentally, Eminem briefly discussed the song with Big Boy on Power 106 this Monday!   Seriously random, considering Recovery was released in 2010…).  Specifically, I was curious about the fine line between […]

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January 30

[title goes here]

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Here’s a confession- I had absolutely no idea what I was going to write about when I signed up for today’s post.  I assumed that, as in the past, inspiration would come to me with time to spare. I was wrong. I wracked my brain.  I read weeks’ worth of Science and Nature emails searching […]

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January 09

Reefer Madness?

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The recent legalization of marijuana in Colorado and Washington makes this is a good time to think about the potential risks of marijuana consumption. Marijuana has a long and storied history of recreational use in humans (earliest evidence of its use is 4000 BC in China1). The popular image of marijuana today is as a […]

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