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Imagine that you are about to take your first bite into a brownie ice cream sundae, or your mom’s homemade special lasagna. I bet the memory of your favorite foods is making your taste buds tingle. Right. This. Second.
Now picture a computer “tasting” the difference between an apple and apple pie. Is a computer algorithm really capable of mimicking our gustatory taste system?
Read MoreIt’s a misty morning in 380 B.C. Greece, and Aristotle is taking his daily stroll along a flowing brook. Eventually he stops and observes the water, letting his eyes soften their focus on its motion. When he finally rips his gaze away, he notices that the stationary rocks around the brook seem to be moving in his gaze, as if they’re floating upstream! He quickly jots this observation down: “the senses are affected in this way when they turn quickly from objects in motion, e.g. from looking at a river and especially from looking at swiftly flowing streams. For objects at rest then seem to be in motion.”
What Aristotle had experienced so many years ago, was something we now call the motion-aftereffect (MAE). The MAE, sometimes called the waterfall effect because of its origin of discovery, is a visual illusion that occurs after our eyes focus on a moving visual stimulus for about 10 milliseconds to a minute, and when we look away, we observe stationary objects moving in the opposite direction of the moving stimulus.
Read MoreWould 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 MoreThe 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 MoreWhen 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.
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“…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 MoreWe 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 MoreThink 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 MoreToday our guest is Professor Dwight Bergles, a professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. In this episode we talk about glia and their role in neuronal circuits, following data wherever it takes you, and a dream of swimming with sperm whales.
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