Laziness, sloth or indolence is, depending on who you ask, a sin, a psychological characteristic, or a basic human right. It is usually used as a pejorative and is considered a disinclination, a personal choice where one the lazy person decides not to carry out an activity despite having the ability, the time […]
You come back home really tired after a long day at work and you decide to take that loooong bath you’ve been waiting for. You stay in the water for some time and suddenly you realize your fingers are wrinkling. Oh boy, that is telling you that you’ve been there for a while and reminds […]
There are two main groups of mammalian brains. Lissencephalic brains have a smooth surface and can be found, for example, in mice, rats or manatees. Gyrencephalic brains, by contrast, have deeply folded brains with gyri (ridges) and sulci (depressions or furrows). They are found, for example, in cats, dogs, pigs, whales, elephants and primates including […]
Fernando Nottebohm was born in Buenos Aires in 1940, a second generation Argentine. Animals fascinated him since he was a child and he always wanted to understand how birds sing. After moving to the United States, he began to investigate the bird behavior and he found, using unilateral denervation of the syrinx, song handedness, i.e […]
The lymphatic system performs important immune functions, and runs parallel to the blood circulatory system to provide a secondary circulation that transports excess interstitial fluid, proteins and metabolic waste products from the systemic tissues back into the blood. For centuries, it was thought that the central nervous system lacks a lymphatic drainage system and the […]
The Penrose–Hameroff theory of orchestrated objective reduction (Orch OR) claims that quantum computations in the brain account for consciousness . The communication among neurons by the secretion of neurotransmitters is based on synaptic vesicles distributed along their axons. The neuronal cytoskeleton has a key role in the dynamics of these vesicles. In the 1990s, Stuart […]
The way we approach pain therapies doesn’t differ from the ones taken for other diseases. The aim is to look for molecular targets, which can be suitable for chemical intervention thoroughly assessing both efficacy and safety profiles for the drug, issues that are addressed throughout various stages of clinical trials. In the specific case of […]
The human brain continues its development postnatally. It is a long process that extends throughout, at least, the first two decades of life. Along these years, environmental factors influence brain functions and, not surprisingly because of its high plasticity, brain structure. Among the variables that may affect the cognitive development is the socioeconomic status. Three […]
True empathy is considered by most researchers to be an exclusive ability of primates, particularly humans and apes, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. However, empathy may be a phylogenetically continuous ability with particular types such as «emotional contagion» present in all classes of mammals. In fact, it has been shown that empathy […]
The idea that the brain might be in a critical state has been around for a while now. Ever since neuroscientists began wondering about where the noisy neural activity recorded in vivo came from, criticality has stood up as one of the main candidates to consider. But what is criticality? The term can be traced […]