Your brain is the most important organ.

But who is the one telling you that?

[neurosciencenews]

Fake news can lead to false memories

Fabricated news stories cause people to create false memories, especially if the content of the stories align with their political beliefs. While people who scored low on cognitive tests were no more prone to forming false memories, they were more likely to remember false facts that aligned with their opinions. People with higher cognitive ability are more likely to question their personal biases and the news source.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Neon Genesis Evangelion S01E16 ‘Splitting of the Breast’ (Hideaki Anno, 1996)

[feminismandmedia]

[tai-korczak]

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain

Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own.

Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable.

Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place.

Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self.

Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops.

Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.

Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.

Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like.

Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head.

Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm.

Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist.

Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening

Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out.

Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence.

Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire.

Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it.

Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone.

Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness.

Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore.

Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time.

Liberosis: The desire to care less about things.

Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years.

Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

Source article. Where words came from.

[bedbugbiting]

My therapist said “I have to show you something on my phone!”

It was this:

[lovedhappysafe-deactivated20230]

ADHD is not quirky

Depression is not aesthetic

Anxiety is not cute

Self harm is not cool

Anorexia is not pretty

OCD is not funny

[tobeagenius]

The brain during a seizure. During a seizure, brain cells go into a spasm of activity, usually starting with a small group of cells and spreading to a larger area of the brain.

[cognitivescience-gd]

Something for your mind. @art-glynadugan

[cognitivescience-gd]

Body Image pt 2

    The misperception of thinness within media as the normal body type in combination with cultivation theory leads to a population with a developed low self-esteem if they do not fall into the “thin” image. The normalization of thinness affects an individual more than they might be aware of. Often times an individual believes that the mass media has greater effects on the rest of the population, rather than themselves. This is known as the third-person effect. It is possible that a woman may be defiant to what she perceives as the norm ideal of thinness, but will participate in dieting and exercise to fulfill that ideal if her self-esteem is associated with how she looks (Yun et al, 2005, 4-6). This shows how thin figures being represented in the media as the norm affects how we appraise the value of the female body; this in combination with being unaware of how this representation affects the mental health of individuals leads to a state of pluralistic ignorance, (a situation in which individuals misperceive the opinions of the majority population),(Yun et al 2005, 10). If individuals are not aware of the effects that mass media has on them cultivation theory is maximized, (due to the ignorance towards one’s own mental health). If an individual does not fall into this “thin” image displayed in the media, and we as a society turn to the media to compare our physical values to, then the individual will see themselves as faulty.

[cognitivescience-gd]

Body Image

    How often do you look in the mirror and smile? Do you find yourself attractive? How often do you think about what you eat or how much you exercise? “Health” blogs promote teas that help “shave off that tummy bump”, or intermittent fasting that cuts your daily caloric intake in half or lower. In reality the teas are diuretic, the intermittent fasting is starving yourself, and your tummy bump is nothing unhealthy. Cultivation theory proposes the idea that the more time an individual spends observing world of television or social media, they are more like to believe that reality aligns with what is portrayed on television or social media. Social comparison theory explains how we in our society are constantly look for ways to accurately measure our value. By presenting certain body types as the “norm” or glorifying them, the media presents a basis of what to compare to. The more this is observed in media the more individuals believe that reality should reflect this normalization. Fifty percent of women and girls are dissatisfied with their bodies (Markey, Markey, 2012). Individuals are not born to hate their bodies, this is a learned trait. The normalization of thinness in the media promotes a self-destructive diet culture that leads to the development of depression and body dysmorphia.

[bryonyashaw]

Meet Cozmo the Robot SDK detailed review.

ABOUT THE CREATORS Anki was founded in 2010 by three Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute graduates! The team focuses on creating unique consu

[cognitivescience-gd]

Our Smart Cousins

Fruit is high in sugar and easy to digest. This provides a lot of energy fast resulting in highly active primates (Miller 3/4/19). Natural selection favors primates with traits that provide better foraging skills. The brain uses a large amount of glucose in comparison to the rest of an organism’s body. High glucose fruits provides that energy for a larger brain. Fruit fuels the large brain which in turn gives primarily fruit-eating primates  the energy to memorize fruit locations and when they are ripe (Milton 2006). Capuchin monkeys are primarily fruit-eaters that remember how and where to find food. They are smart enough to crack clams open by hitting them against a hard surface (Video). The high BMR of fruit-eaters and necessity to remember where to find their food results in smaller primates with a bigger brain compared to their body size.

[bryonyashaw]

Meet Cozmo, a gifted little guy who’s got a mind of his own and a few tricks up his sleeve. He’s the sweet spot where supercomputer meets loyal sidekick. Curiously smart and a little mischievous. You see, Cozmo is a real-life robot like you’ve only seen in movies, with a one-of-a-kind personality that evolves the more you hang out. He’ll nudge you to play and keep you constantly surprised. Cozmo’s your accomplice in a crazy amount of fun. 

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i don’t think anything has ever shifted my world view quite like learning that clouds can weigh millions of tons

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

they’re made of enormous amounts of water vapor and it somehow just never occurred to me

[cognitivescience-gd]

Multiple Faucets!

The repetition of motions in addition to concentration of thought during the learning process allows humans to develop and process new skills in a more efficient way than if only one method of teaching is implemented. Through the body connecting to the brain, there are neural pathways known as “axons” that send signals to the brain when an action is done. Actions include any use of  the brain such as memory development, sight, scent/taste, hearing, or motion. Once something is learned, the constant repetition of that act adds layers of “myelin” that insulates the axon pathway; this prevents energy loss from signals as they travel to the brain.

[neurosciencestuff]

(Image caption: Multiple synapse heads send out filopodia (green) converging on one microglia (red), as seen by focused ion beam scanning electron microscopy (FIBSEM). Credit: L. Weinhard, EMBL Rome)

Captured on film for the first time: microglia nibbling on brain synapses

For the first time, EMBL researchers have captured microglia nibbling on brain synapses. Their findings show that the special glial cells help synapses grow and rearrange, demonstrating the essential role of microglia in brain development. Nature Communications publishes the results on March 26.

Around one in ten cells in your brain are microglia. Cousins of macrophages, they act as the first and main contact in the central nervous system’s active immune defense. They also guide healthy brain development. Researchers have proposed that microglia pluck off and eat synapses - connections between brain cells - as an essential step in the pruning of connections during early circuit refinement. But, until now, no one had seen them do it.

Microglia make synapses stronger

That is why Laetitia Weinhard, from the Gross group at EMBL Rome, set out on a massive imaging study to actually see this process in action in the mouse brain, in collaboration with the Schwab team at EMBL Heidelberg. “Our findings suggest that microglia are nibbling synapses as a way to make them stronger, rather than weaker,” says Cornelius Gross, who led the work.

Warm welcome

The team saw that around half of the time that microglia contact a synapse, the synapse head sends out thin projections or ‘filopodia’ to greet them. In one particularly dramatic case – as seen in the accompanying image – fifteen synapse heads extended filopodia toward a single microglia as it picked on a synapse. “As we were trying to see how microglia eliminate synapses, we realised that microglia actually induce their growth most of the time,” Laetitia Weinhard explains.

It turns out that microglia might underly the formation of double synapses, where the terminal end of a neuron releases neurotransmitters onto two neighboring partners instead of one. This process can support effective connectivity between neurons. Weinhard: “This shows that microglia are broadly involved in structural plasticity and might induce the rearrangement of synapses, a mechanism underlying learning and memory.”

Perseverance

Since this was the first attempt to visualise this process in the brain, the current paper entails five years of technological development. The team tried three different state-of-the-art imaging systems before they succeeded. Finally, by combining correlative light and electron microscopy (CLEM) and light sheet fluorescence microscopy - a technique developed at EMBL - they were able to make the first movie of microglia eating synapses.

“This is what neuroscientists fantasised about for years, but nobody had ever seen before,” says Cornelius Gross. “These findings allow us to propose a mechanism for the role of microglia in the remodeling and evolution of brain circuits during development.” In the future, he plans to investigate the role of microglia in brain development during adolescence and the possible link to the onset of schizophrenia and depression.

[brainsandbodies]

In PT school I’ve learned a lot of things including how to connect with patients, use differential diagnosis skills, and educate. With a profession that involves the intimacy of human touch, it can be both powerful and scary. We were asked to watch a short field recently on Vaginismus, a condition of the pelvic floor that causes involuntary contractions with stimulation.

As PT’s, we recognize that the pelvic floor plays a large role in stability, movement, and in some, pain. I encourage you to take 10 minutes to see from the perspective of a patient and recognize the power taboo has in healthcare and information consumption.

If you have questions, please feel free to comment or DM. I encourage safe spaces for conversation and have a 0 tolerance for bullying or shaming.