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 28

Synesthesia: The sky, the number 7, and sadness are all blue

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If you were shown the shapes below and told that one is called a “kiki” and the other a “bouba,” which name would you attribute to which shape? Between 95 and 98% of people agree that the more rigid shape is “kiki,” and the curvy one is “bouba.” This is not because they learned these names […]

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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 12

Pattern separation gone awry: the dentate gyrus and schizophrenia

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[Image Source: Sebastian Seung via http://connectomethebook.com/.] Since the discovery of patient H.M. in the 1950s (see this post from October 2013), scientists have known that the hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure located in the medial temporal lobe, is crucial for the successful formation of new memories. The mammalian hippocampus is characterized by several distinct regions, each with […]

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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 22

Consciousness in your dreams?

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“A dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream.” -Arthur Schopenhauer Dreaming has entranced thinkers from the beginning of recorded history, and it’s easy to see why. Both Socrates and Plato agreed that dreaming is a total abandonment of reason. More contemporaneously, no less than Kant and Schopenhauer identified dreaming as […]

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May 15

The Birth of Tragedy: Pessimism and the Brain (Part 2)

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Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? – Friedrich Nietzsche In the first part of this article we examined contrasts in attitude and outlook between optimistic and pessimistic people and possible differences in the brain leading to these contrasts. The next question is, […]

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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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from www.thecelerymuseum.com May 01

Humor Me

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Is your Facebook timeline as cluttered with Buzzfeed quizzes as mine is?  I have to admit a certain weakness for them- I just can’t resist the temptation to know which 90’s Heroine or Broad City character I am (answers: Ty from “Clueless” and Abbi).  These quizzes are just another iteration of the very human desire […]

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April 21

Peas or carrots: Evidence-based education programs targeting stress and attention

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I’m always keen to hear how scientists are able to reach out to their communities, whether it is by talking to young students about research opportunities, by tutoring or teaching, or by taking steps outside the lab to make direct links between research and the community. At this year’s meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), one of […]

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