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Catch up on Neurotalk by checking out our Season 3 Archive here.
Season 3 features include The Highlight Reel with the best clips from all seasons of Neurotalk, a special episode on The Future of Scholarly Publishing, our two most popular interviews to date (with Michael Shadlen and James Surmeier), and much more!
We’ve all seen it in action. Tell a puppy dog to sit, and if he obeys, he gets a treat. Rinse and repeat this reinforcement training, and you soon have an obedient puppy dog that sits on command. How does this reinforcement work? And why does it need to occur so soon after the desired behavior?
Read MoreHow do brains generate randomness? We’ll talk about what randomness means in the brain - does it mean generating random numbers, much like a computer, or something more? We will then talk about why, when and finally, how the brain generates randomness.
Read MoreToday, our guest is Prof. Lorenz Studer, Professor of Developmental Biology at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York City. In this episode, we will talk about transplantation therapies specifically for Parkinson’s and growing your very own dopaminergic neurons.
"New in Neuroscience" is a new feature highlighting recent neuroscience findings. In this edition, Malcolm Campbell discusses a recent research article about how the brain pays attention to some things, while ignoring others.
The ability to selectively attend to relevant stimuli and ignore distractions is essential to animal survival. This ability is especially interesting to neuroscientists since it involves the interaction of executive control--the “mind” of the animal--with early sensory processing. It is widely believed that executive control originates in the cortex, whereas sensory signals originate in the periphery and travel to the cortex through subcortical structures such as the brain stem and the thalamus.
Read MoreWe all have an anecdote or two about real-life sensations—the smell of cooking food, the noise of thunderstorms, or the pressure of a full bladder—that made appearances in our dreams. It’s not that rare for external stimuli, when they happen to occur during dream-producing REM sleep, to be incorporated into dream content. Becca Krock discusses one such case, involving dreams, drums, and an impatient cat.
Read MoreToday, our guest is Dr. Loren Frank, Professor of Physiology at UCSF. Today, we’ll talk about the hippocampus and memories, delayed gratification, and physics vs. neuroscience.
ln this week's episode, we talk about the hippocampus and memories, delayed gratification, and physics vs. neuroscience.
Dr. Loren Frank is Professor of Physiology at UCSF.
Neuroscience has a lot of mantras. I blame textbooks.
The concept of “one neurotransmitter per neuron” nicely streamlines any discussion of neuron types. The problem: it’s at best reflection of 80-year-old dogma, and a wild over-simplification. So the fact that evidence to the contrary is rarely found in textbooks should … not surprise you.
The 1930s gave us many things: instant coffee, trampolines, and most relevant to this post, Dale’s Principle, which states that, “the nature of the chemical function … is characteristic for each particular neurone, and unchangeable”. Although this assumption remains the default, co-release of neurotransmitters has been formally discussed (read: published about) since at least 1976. In the past decade, the idea that neurons can release more than one neurotransmitter has gained ever wider acceptance amongst neuroscientists, with the list of brain regions containing co-releasing neurons growing rapidly.
But what does co-release look like at the level of synapses? And why is there an image from my PhD qualifying proposal in this post?
Read MoreIs there any connection between memory and sleep?
Common beliefs are that a good night’s sleep will enhance recall of old and learning of new memories, prevent memories from decaying, and improve insight. But how much of these premises are actually true? Does the right amount of sleep really work miracles when it comes to learning and remembering information? And if so, how can we use these insights in school?
Read MoreHow do we tell when someone is experiencing anterograde amnesia?
Anterograde amnesia, refers to the ability to lay down new memories. Persons with anterograde amnesia may not perceive any symptoms, or they may be profoundly confused and disoriented. Kelly Zalocusky describes the symptoms of anterograde amnesia, and explains the differences between this particular type of memory deficit, and another common form, dementia.
Read MoreHome of NeuWrite West and the Stanford Neuroblog.
Do you have burning questions about how the brain works? You’ve come to the right place! Submit all your questions to NeuWrite West and we will have a neuroscientist research and answer your question.
Note: The NeuWrite West team consists of research scientists. Therefore, we can not provide answers to questions of a medical nature; we are not medical doctors.
Questions will have a turn-around time of approximately one month.
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