Supersensors: How the loss of one sense impacts the others

/
Supersensors: How the loss of one sense impacts the others

Would you ever voluntarily give up one of your senses? Turns out, the answer for an ever-increasing number of people is yes (albeit only temporarily). Novelty concepts such as dining in the dark have risen in popularity over the past decade; restaurant-goers frequently give up their sense of sight as a way to have a “heightened” mealtime experience. Most of these diners believe that their temporary blindness intensifies their other sensations - but how would a more permanent loss of sensation affect the ways we perceive our world?

Read More

For those with pure word deafness, actions always speak louder than words

/
For those with pure word deafness, actions always speak louder than words

The phone rings — you hear it. The caller ID displays — you read it. You pick up the phone — you say hello. But no matter how hard you listen, you can’t understand a single word that’s said either by you or the caller. 

No, you haven't just crossed over into the Twilight Zone; you have a rare syndrome called pure word deafness (PWD). Individuals with PWD cannot understand any speech, even if they can identify other sounds and read written words with no difficulty whatsoever

Read More

The ballad of flavor, or Why my mother smells funny

/
The ballad of flavor, or Why my mother smells funny

When I say my mother smells funny, I don't mean that she has an odor or can sniff out humor, but that her senses have been altered. A number of years ago, my mother slipped on a bathroom floor and hit her head. The displacement of her brain stunned her seventh nerve and severed her olfactory bulb, which convey taste and smell, respectively. For several weeks the experience of eating was like chewing textured cardboard. Her sense of texture was intact, but if she closed her eyes she couldn’t tell the difference between biting into a fresh apple and biting into a raw potato. Luckily, her taste recovered (debatable), but her smell hasn’t.
 

Read More

Lighting the Way: Project Prakash Opens Our Eyes to a World of Humanitarian Research

/
Lighting the Way: Project Prakash Opens Our Eyes to a World of Humanitarian Research

In America, we all know Helen Keller. But we don’t know the more than 200,000 blind children in India. We don’t know that blind children in India do not go to school; that many end up begging on the streets (if they are of the “lucky” half that survives past the age of five). We don’t know that many of these blind children have easily curable disorders, like cataracts. But Pawan Sinha, founder of Project Prakash (meaning “light” in Sanskrit), saw what we have all been blind to. He saw a chance to help these children by providing free medical treatment to restore their vision. However, because the brain's ability to process visual information emerges early in development, there was one question that Project Prakash would need to answer: After removing cataracts from an older child, would the brain still possess the ability to learn how to interpret visual signals in order to recognize objects?

Read More

Our eyes and brain. Relationship status: It’s complicated.

/
Our eyes and brain. Relationship status: It’s complicated.

“…Crosses over? Like in an X shape? Well that seems ridiculous”, my younger sister scoffed. After 10 minutes of me trying to briefly explain our visual system to her over the phone, she still couldn’t believe that sending signals from our eyes to our brain wasn’t a straight “Point A to Point B” system. While any human with common sense would agree with my sister’s logic, transmitting signals from our eyes to our brain is a much more complicated process, involving multiple intermediate functions and convoluted pathways.

Read More

Two sides of the same coin: MSG and umami

/
Two sides of the same coin: MSG and umami

We all occasionally crave a good cup of instant ramen. But what often holds us back from enjoying one is a combination of factors that make ramen unhealthy: processed ingredients, preservatives—and MSG. We generally know MSG as the menace, the unhealthy additive that makes cheap Asian food distinctively enjoyable but also makes us extremely thirsty afterwards. So what exactly is MSG?

Read More

Have you ever tasted pain?

/
Have you ever tasted pain?

Think about the last time you ate something spicy, whether it be Hot Cheetos, a jalapeño, or sriracha. Did your nose flush? Did you sweat? Cry? And what did it feel like? Like you were breathing fire or like you were getting your tongue pinched?

Those are sensations many of us have experienced to some degree when we’ve eaten spicy foods. The question is: why?

Read More

Reading Between the Bars: How to see through figures and influence your audience

/
Reading Between the Bars: How to see through figures and influence your audience

Although we would like to think of ourselves as independent readers and thoughtful evaluators of published data, it turns out that figure format heavily influences our perception of the data – even when the data points represented by the figure are identical. In this edition of "New in Neuroscience," Kat Kozyrytska describes a study by Prof. Barbara Tversky, who looks at the way people have been representing information visually for thousands of years.

Image credit: Kat Kozyrytska 

Read More