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Does a bigger brain make you smarter?
In this version of Ask a Neuroscientist, Kendra Lechtenberg discusses humanity's love affair with the idea that our exceptional cognitive abilities must mean we have the largest brains of any animal.
Read MoreThis week on Brains and Bourbon, we chat with Boris Heifets about anesthesia and the brain, treating Parkinson's disease with electrical stimulation, and why taking ecstasy might be a good idea if you suffer from depression*.
Dr. Heifets is an anesthesiologist at Stanford Hospital, as well as a postdoctoral researcher in Rob Malenka's lab.
*And you do it in your doctor's office.
This week on Neurotalk, we chat with Kelsey Martin about the road from literature to neuroscience, tagging synapses, and what to do with all these PhDs.
Dr. Martin is the Chair and professor of Biological Chemistry and professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at University of California Los Angeles.
Lately, I’ve been on the hunt for connections between cell biology, which is what I am studying for my PhD, and neuroscience, which has been the focus of this blog (see my last post, The Cell Cycle for the Neuroscientist: 3 Useful Concepts). This past weekend at a small local conference sponsored by the American Society for Cell Biology I stumbled across a doozy of a connection: the cytoskeleton. Cell biologists are obsessed with the cytoskeleton because it has a role in almost everything a cell does, from how a cell eats to how it moves, to how it holds shape and divides. But cell biologists did not discover the cytoskeleton. Neuroscientists did.
Photo credit: Matthew Daniels. Source: Wellcome Images
Read MoreThis week on Brains and Bourbon, we talk immunology with Mary Cavanagh, who explains how specialized cells recognize self v. non-self to keep the body safe, and how loss of that recognition can lead to a whole host of problems.
Dr. Cavanagh is a postdoc in Jorg Goronzy’s lab here at Stanford, as well as a frequent contributor to the Neuroblog.
Brains & Bourbon airs every Wednesday at 1pm on 90.1FM KZSU, which can be streamed here: http://kzsulive.stanford.edu/
This week on Neurotalk, we chat with Karel Svoboda about how studying the brain inspires invention, the development of two-photon microscopy, visualizing synaptic turnover, and more!
Dr. Svoboda is a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Janelia Farms.
This piece is about the latest published paper of Dr. Marlieke van Kesteren, postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. This research paper is now published in early access format on the website of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. The experiment has been executed at the Donders Institute of the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the group of professor Guillén Fernández.
Read MoreThis week on Neurotalk, we chat with Loren Looger about the first calcium indicators, designer proteins, and how the self-described "worst talk in the history of the world" landed him his own lab.
Dr. Looger is a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Janelia Farms.
This week on "Brains and Bourbon," we share a glass of whiskey with Tony Ricci as we discuss hearing, rebuilding his lab after hurricane Katrina, and more!
Dr. Ricci is a professor of otolaryngology and molecular and cellular physiology here at Stanford, as well as the director of the Stanford neurosciences PhD program.
Brains & Bourbon airs every Wednesday at 1pm on 90.1FM KZSU, which can be streamed here: http://kzsulive.stanford.edu/
In this issue of Ask a Neuroscientist, Dr. Talia Lerner fields a question about the exact relationship between dopamine and addiction. Writing in response to a question from Peter Senavallis, Talia says: "the dopamine hypothesis of drug addiction ... has been a driving force in addiction research ever since people noticed that addictive drugs all seem to act in one way or another on dopamine regulation." However, she notes (and describes) recent research that "calls into question the idea that dopamine neuron stimulation would be sufficient to induce and sustain all the classic hallmarks of addiction, both behavioral and molecular. "
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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