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Posts Tagged ‘Neuron’

Image via Wikipedia Please forgive the absurd title here … its just a play on words from a flabby, middle-aged science geek who is as alluring to “the ladies” as an old leather boot. Like a lot of males (with active fantasy lives I suppose), my interest was piqued by the recent headline, “What Do [...]

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Image via Wikipedia You already know this, but when you are stressed out (chronic stress), your brain doesn’t work very well.  That’s right – just when you need it most – your brain has a way of letting you down! Here are a few things that happen to the very cells (in the hippocampus) that [...]

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What if you had magic fingers and could touch a place on a person’s body and make all their pain and anguish disappear?  This would be the stuff of legends, myths and miracles! Here’s a research review by Kerry J Ressler  and Helen S Mayberg on the modern ability to electrically “touch” the Vagus Nerve. [...]

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Image by dullhunk via Flickr On Fridays, after a regular practice session, our shala is open for quiet meditation.  This is a new experience for me, even as I’ve read much about the mental and physical health benefits accrued by experienced practitioners.  As someone who is totally exhausted after practice – indeed, I couldn’t move [...]

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Image via Wikipedia In this essay, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama addresses the question, “What possible benefit could there be for a scientific discipline such as neuroscience in engaging in dialogue with Buddhist contemplative tradition?”

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Image by alicepopkorn via Flickr Some of the most epic and beautiful of the yoga sutras are found in the final book IV.  One of them popped into mind when I came across a recent neuroscience report entitled, “Predicting Persuasion-Induced Behavior Change from the Brain” by Emily Falk and colleagues at the Department of Psychology [...]

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Image by jurvetson via Flickr Like many folks, I generally feel better ever since I started practicing yoga.  Outwardly, my body is (slowly) growing stronger and more flexible and perhaps (hopefully) soon, I’ll even lose a few pounds.  However, even if I was to convince myself that looked slimmer (skinny mirrors?), the only way to [...]

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Image by koolb via Flickr In some ways, the 8 limbs of yoga described in the yoga sutras, seem a bit like a ladder, rather than a concentric set of outreached arms or spokes on a wheel.  It seems like I’m working toward something.  But what?  I certainly feel healthier, and also enjoy the satisfaction [...]

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Image by vramak via Flickr One of the themes that emerges in I.I atha yoganusasanam, and runs throughout the yoga sutras, is the notion that a yoga practice will bring one into a deeper awareness of the self.  To begin to explore the modern science notion of self-awareness, here’s a 2009 paper entitled, “The ‘prediction [...]

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Image by MAMJODH via Flickr Oxygen is the key to life.  This is because it loves electrons.  In the mitochondria of every cell in your body, oxygen (in is atmospheric O2 state) serves as the ultimate electron acceptor and provides the chemical energy that drives the formation of ATP (a form of chemical energy storage [...]

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Image by BiggerPictureImages.com via Flickr Sometimes, when flipping channels late at night, its hard NOT to stop and gawk at the various spectacles on reality-trash-TV.  No self-respecting scientist would admit to being smitten by all the vanity and preening – right?  Well, back in 2002, there was a mouse whose homeobox-B8 gene was disrupted – [...]

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Image via Wikipedia For a great many reasons, research on mental illness is focused on the frontal cortex.  Its just a small part of the brain, and certainly, many things can go wrong in other places during brain/cognitive development, but, it remains a robust finding, that when the frontal cortex is not working well, individuals [...]

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One of the complexities in beginning to understand how genetic variation relates to cognitive function and behavior is that – unfortunately – there is no gene for “personality”, “anxiety”, “memory” or any other type of “this” or “that” trait.  Most genes are expressed rather broadly across the entire brain’s cortical layers and subcortical systems.  So, [...]

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Image by Biking Nikon PDX via Flickr One of the difficult aspects of understanding mental illness, is separating the real causes of the illness from what might be secondary or tertiary consequences of having the illness.  If you think about a car whose engine is not running normally, there may be many observable things going [...]

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If you compare the left panel to the right panel, you’ll see a dendrite (grey) with dendritic spines (green) on the left-side and then, on the right-side, these spines enveloped by the membrane of an astrocyte (white).  These images were obtained from synapse-web.org who use a method known as 3D reconstruction of serial section electron [...]

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Phrenological thinking, a popular pseudoscientific practice in the 1800′s suggested that the structure of the head and underlying brain held the clues to understanding human behavior.  Today, amidst the ongoing convergence of developmental science, molecular & biochemical science and systems-dynamical science (to name just a few), there is – of course – no single or [...]

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According to Joseph LeDoux, “One of the most important contributions of modern neuroscience has been to show that the nature/nurture debate operates around a false dichotomy: the assumption that biology, on one hand, and lived experience, on the other, affect us in fundamentally different ways” (ref).  Indeed.  While I know not where the current debate [...]

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Image via Wikipedia In previous posts, we have explored some of the basic molecular (de-repression of chromatin structure) and cellular (excess synaptogenesis) consequences of mutations in the MeCP2 gene – a.k.a the gene whose loss of function gives rise to Rett syndrome.  One of the more difficult aspects of understanding how a mutation in a [...]

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Celebrities and politicians are known for their love of the spotlight.  “Me, me, me!”  are the words to get ahead by in our modern media circus.   As well, it can even be – in the unglamorous world of science – where, in characteristically geeky form, the conventional wisdom is to shout, “my hypothesis, my [...]

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