Neuroscience

Watch

• The psychology of narcissism - W. Keith Campbell ↗TED-Ed
• How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains | Richard J. Davidson | TEDxSanFrancisco ↗TEDx Talks
• Borderline Personality Disorder through the lens of Evolution & Neuroscience | Valerie Porr | TEDxKI ↗TEDx Talks
• The Brain-Changing Benefits of Exercise | Wendy Suzuki | TED ↗TED
• How pregnancy dramatically resculpts the brain - BBC REEL ↗BBC Global
• This Is What Happens to Your Brain on Opioids | Short Film Showcase ↗National Geographic

Read

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales ↗A captivating collection of neurological case studies, this work illuminates the profound and often peculiar ways brain disorders reveal the intricate architecture of the human mind.Oliver Sacks
• Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain ↗Challenging the traditional mind-body dichotomy, this book masterfully argues for the indispensable role of emotion in rational thought and decision-making, grounded in compelling neurological evidence.Antonio Damasio
• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing InformationA seminal paper that established fundamental constraints on human short-term memory, offering enduring insights into the architecture of cognitive processing.George A. Miller
• Long-term potentiation: a mechanism for memory? ↗This groundbreaking research identified long-term potentiation (LTP), providing a crucial cellular mechanism for synaptic plasticity and the biological basis of learning and memory.T. V. P. Bliss and T. Lømo
• Principles of Neural Science ↗This authoritative tome offers the definitive, encyclopaedic survey of the nervous system, indispensable for any serious student seeking a rigorous foundation in neurobiology.Eric R. Kandel, James H. Schwartz, Thomas M. Jessell, Steven A. Siegelbaum, A. J. Hudspeth

Voices to follow

• Daniel Kahneman ↗His seminal research on cognitive biases and the dual systems of thought has profoundly influenced our understanding of human judgment and decision-making.Psychologist, Nobel laureate, author of "Thinking, Fast and Slow".
• Lisa Feldman Barrett ↗A leading voice challenging traditional theories of emotion, she posits that emotions are not innate reactions but rather constructed by the brain based on context and experience.University Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Northeastern University; Chief Science Officer, Center for Law, Brain & Behavior, Harvard Medical School.
• Antonio Damasio ↗His groundbreaking work illuminates the indispensable role of emotions and bodily states in consciousness, reasoning, and social behaviour, bridging the gap between mind and brain.Professor of Neuroscience, University of Southern California; Director, Brain and Creativity Institute.
• Carl Zimmer ↗An exceptionally clear and engaging explainer of complex biological and neurological phenomena, making cutting-edge scientific discoveries accessible to a wide readership.Science journalist, author, columnist for The New York Times.

Glossary

• BrainThe brain is the control center of your body, a soft organ inside your head that helps you think, feel, move, and remember everything. It's like the main computer for your entire body. For example, your brain helps you solve a math problem, decide what to eat for lunch, and remember your friend's birthday.
• CerebrumThe cerebrum is the largest part of your brain, responsible for your thinking, learning, memory, and senses like sight and hearing. It's where you do all your conscious processing. For example, when you read a book, understand a joke, or decide what to wear, your cerebrum is doing most of the work.
• MemoryMemory is your brain's ability to store, keep, and later recall information and experiences. It's how you remember things from the past. For example, remembering your best friend's name, how to ride a bicycle, or what you had for breakfast this morning are all thanks to your memory.
• Nervous SystemThe nervous system is the body's communication network, made up of your brain, spinal cord, and all the nerves that reach every part of you. It's how your body sends and receives information quickly. For example, when you see a ball coming towards you, your nervous system quickly tells your muscles to move your hands to catch it.
• NeuronA neuron is a tiny, special cell that sends and receives electrical and chemical messages in your body. It's like a tiny wire that carries information. For example, when you touch a hot stove, neurons in your finger send a quick message to your brain, telling you to pull your hand away.
• NeurotransmitterNeurotransmitters are chemical messengers that carry signals between neurons. They help neurons talk to each other across tiny gaps. For example, a neurotransmitter called dopamine helps you feel happy and motivated when you achieve something, like scoring a goal in a game.
• PlasticityPlasticity (or brain plasticity) is your brain's amazing ability to change and adapt throughout your life, by forming new connections or strengthening old ones. It means your brain can learn new things and recover from injuries. For example, when you learn to play a new instrument or master a new sport, your brain is showing plasticity by creating and strengthening the connections needed for those skills.
• SensesSenses are the ways your body takes in information about the world around you, like sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. They are your brain's windows to the outside. For example, when you smell freshly baked cookies, hear your favorite song, or feel the warmth of the sun, your senses are sending that information to your brain.
• Spinal CordThe spinal cord is a long bundle of nerves that runs down your back, connecting your brain to the rest of your body. It acts like a superhighway for messages going to and from the brain. For example, if you accidentally touch something sharp, the spinal cord quickly sends the pain signal to your brain and then sends back a message to pull your hand away, sometimes even before your brain fully processes the pain.
• SynapseA synapse is the tiny gap or connection point where one neuron passes a message to another neuron. It's like a bridge that information crosses. For example, when you decide to lift your arm, the message travels from one neuron to the next across many synapses until it reaches the muscles in your arm.

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Where this connects to other fields, and why it's worth knowing.

• Poetry Literature

  Some brain-damaged patients can't put together a single spoken sentence, yet they can still recite a whole poem or sing a song. That's because rhythm and rhyme travel a different route through the brain than everyday talking. Poetry survives in the mind after plain speech has been knocked out.

• Latitude, Longitude, and GPS Geography

  Deep in your brain sit special cells that draw a live map of wherever you are, your own built-in GPS. But like any muscle, if you never use it, it weakens. Lean on your phone's GPS for every turn and that inner mapmaker may quietly start to fade.

• Language Acquisition Literature

  There's a closing window in childhood for wiring up a first language, and tragic cases of neglected 'feral children' show what happens if it's missed: the brain never fully learns to speak. Language isn't just poured in anytime; the brain has to build the wiring while it's still young enough. Miss that period and no amount of teaching fully fixes it.

• Literacy & Numeracy Education

  When you learned to read, your brain didn't grow a new reading part, it stole one. A patch of visual cortex that evolved to recognize faces and objects gets hijacked to recognize letters instead. That's why a reading brain and a non-reading brain are physically wired differently: culture reached in and repurposed the hardware.

• Human Development & Readiness Education

  A kid's brain doesn't grow by just piling on more and more connections. It first overbuilds a wild tangle of them, then aggressively prunes the ones it doesn't use, like a sculptor chipping away stone. So growing up and learning is as much about cutting away as it is about building up.

• Contested Memory & Heritage History

  Here's the wild part about memory: every time you pull one up, your brain slightly rewrites it before filing it away again, so 'remembering' quietly edits the past. A country retelling its origin story does the identical thing, just with millions of people at once. Both a person and a nation are constantly reshaping a past that never sits perfectly still.

• Famous Artists and Paintings Arts & Design

  A cartoon caricature exaggerates a big nose or huge chin, and your brain loves it. That's because the vision part of your brain is already wired to notice exactly those features, so the artist is hitting a built-in sweet spot, like a flavor that's sweeter than any real fruit.

• Populism and Nationalism Political Science

  Oxytocin gets called the 'bonding hormone' because it makes you trust and love people close to you. But the same chemical also makes you more suspicious of outsiders. So the warm glow of belonging to your group has a built-in us-versus-them edge.

• The Loneliness Epidemic Sociology

  Getting rejected or left out lights up the very same brain spot as a physical burn or bruise. That's why being excluded genuinely hurts, and it's also why a painkiller like Tylenol can actually dull the sting of heartbreak a little.

• Utilitarianism vs Kantian Ethics Philosophy

  Imagine pushing one man off a bridge to save five people. Brain scans show that thought lights up your emotion centers, screaming 'no', while cold calculation fires a different, more logical part. So a giant moral debate might really be two parts of your own brain arguing.

• Countries, Capitals & Continents Geography

  Memorizing where countries sit on a map uses the same brain cells that remember where you left your keys, special 'place' and 'grid' cells in a region called the hippocampus. Your brain's built-in GPS, evolved for finding your way home, gets borrowed to learn the world map.

• The Trolley Problem Philosophy

  Most people say pulling a lever to divert a runaway trolley and kill one person to save five is fine, but shoving a stranger off a bridge to stop it feels horrible, even though the body count is identical. Brain scans show why: the shove lights up your emotion circuits, while the lever runs on cold calculation. Your 'inconsistent' answers are really two parts of your brain arguing.

• Plastic Pollution Environment

  Your brain has a strict security gate that blocks almost every molecule from getting in. Scientists have now found tiny plastic bits slipping past it. Evolution walled off the brain harder than anything, and our plastic still got through.

• Games, Play & Interactive Media Arts & Design

  An ABCD study examined children’s reported gaming alongside working-memory and response-inhibition tasks and brain imaging. Its observational design makes games a setting for studying cognition, while also showing an important limit: associations between gaming, task performance and brain activity do not establish that playing caused those differences.

  Sources: Chaarani et al. — Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children (corrected article) ↗

• Food, Culture & Identity Sociology

  NIDCD explains that flavor combines taste with smell, texture and temperature. Food therefore offers a concrete meeting point between sensory processing and cultural interpretation: the nervous system helps explain how a meal is perceived, while traditions help explain what that meal signifies. Neither explanation substitutes for the other.

  Sources: NIDCD — Taste disorders: how taste and flavor work ↗ · UNESCO — Washoku, traditional dietary cultures of the Japanese, notably for the celebration of New Year ↗