Imagine being a brain scientist, or a pothead (or both) in the 1990’s, and waking up to this headline1: That is exactly what happened in December 1992, when the field reported two ground-breaking discoveries in a single issue of Science2 (the NY Times of modern scientific research). Scientists had finally identified a specific receptor–the…
The idea for this article comes from a random morning where for some reason, instead of going through my morning routine mindlessly as usual, I actually decided to think about it. I reached out to pick up my toothbrush from amongst a handful that belonged to my family, and I could not, for the life…
Are you conscious? Is an ant? Is a grain of salt? Why does it matter what consciousness is? Well, for me, it is so fundamental to my existence that I feel I cannot know myself without first having thought about what consciousness is- and where does it come from, and why does it exist, and…
Your body can encode about 25,ooo genes. But there’s another 5 million genes that are produced by the bacteria that live in your gut. That’s more than 99% of the total genetic material of your body! (1) The gut is very commonly referred to as the ‘second brain’ of our body, and for very…
If you’ve ever scrolled through health and wellness content on social media, you HAVE heard about dopamine, the supposed ‘reward’ or ‘pleasure’ chemical of the brain. You must have also heard about practising dopamine detox. Right off the bat, dopamine detoxes are NOT what you think, and they do NOT work the way you’re lead…
You might have heard Brad Pitt talk about how he has difficulty differentiating and remembering faces. He probably suffers from something termed ‘prosopagnosia‘ (don’t sweat trying to read it, it’s proso-pag-nosia), essentially ‘face blindness’. When Brad Pitt sees 2 different people, he might be able to recognize them by their voice, body language, gestures etc,…