Neuroscience: Amateur Hour

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by uncontrollable movements, stiffness, and cognitive decline. Curious? Come learn more!   Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, queries, or complaints, please email me at neuroscienceamateurhour@gmail.com or DM me at NeuroscienceAmateurHour on Instagram. Also if you have the mean...

Dreams are both scientifically fascinating and universal. Everyone dreams, at every age and they are often nonsensical, complex, and deeply subjective. How can you quantify something so personal in the activity of cells, circuits, and systems? Let's find out together! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, queries, or complaints, please email me...

Have you ever thought about why some feelings might be described as gut -wrenching? Or why do the first feelings of love make you feel butterflies in the stomach ? It's time to explore how your gut and your brain are connected! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, queries, or complaints, please email me at neuroscienceamateurhour@gmail.com or D...

A tragic incident - a brain injury, a stroke, the development of a neurodegenerative disease, and all of a sudden, a patient's arm no longer belongs to them. It will pull their hair, pinch their cheeks, and grab miscellaneous objects, seemingly developing a mind of its own. How can something that belongs to you and is controlled by your brain, your electrical pulses, and your motor neurons ev...

Could a dead salmon be thinking or is something else at play? If you're curious about the answer to that question and want to learn more about magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), come and listen! Featuring special guest the Eventually To be Dr. Ilya, this episode discusses the science behind MRI, how noise can affect imaging and landmark studies in the field! Please rate, review, and subscribe...

Two words - Octopus brains! Nine of them!!! But seriously, if you want to learn about the insanity of the dispersed octopus nervous system, come and take a listen! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questions, comments, concerns, queries, or complaints, please email me at neuroscienceamateurhour@gmail.com or DM me at NeuroscienceAmateurHour on Instagram. Also if you have the me...

Hello! I return! Today we will be talking about the neuroscience of seizures and epilepsy. Brought about an imbalance of the accelerators (excitatory circuits) and brakes (inhibitory circuits) of the brain, seizures are pretty terrifying events. They're marked by temporary confusion, a staring spell, uncontrollable jerking of the arms and legs (like what you see when someone depicts a seizure...

That's a wrap on Season 1 folks! See you all in a few weeks with more episodes about epilepsy, alcohol, and more!  Happy researching and I'll see you all again soon! Support the show

Apologies for the absolute chaos that is this episode. Today I wanted to cover some foundational background concepts, including how a signal travel within a neuron from dendrites to the tip of the axon and how that neuron then communicates to other neurons and parts of the body. Curious? Come and listen to find out more!!! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questions, comments,...

This episode is part two of my miniseries on the neuroscience of language production and processing and today we're touching on how the brain regions encoding those concepts change in deaf individuals. It turns out that the brain is the literal embodiment of that "its free real estate" meme and vision input takes over the auditory cortex! If you're curious to know more - come a...

Tobacco has a long and storied history but its effects on the modern world cannot be ignored. It was hailed as a cure to many ailments for years but as we understand more - we understand that its REALLY bad for you. Something like 80-90% of lung cancer cases are related to smoking along with a plethora of other diseases.  Curious? Want to learn more about the receptors and brain areas affected by...

So this week’s episode is all about speech production. Speech is a fundamental way of communicating our needs, desires, threats, resources, etc to our conspecifics. But do you know about the circuits and muscles and brain regions responsible for our ability to physically produce speech? Curious? Come and take a listen! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questions, comments, con...

Today’s episode is inspired by a historical nightmare and the subsequent decades-long experiment that shaped the way we understand childhood neglect and its effects on the developing brain.  In 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and the rest of the world discovered that over 170,000 Romanian children were being kept in impoverished institutions and orphanages. These children...

This week we will be learning about bipolar disorder! It's a condition characterized by extreme mood swings from emotional highs to emotional lows. One week someone may end up sleeping 24 hours straight and the next week go on a $10,000 gambling spree in Vegas. Are you curious about the neural activity and neurotransmitters involved in these sudden shifts in mood? Come and take a listen to Ep...

Welcome back! This week, I want to talk about your ears and how going to super loud concerts can impact your ability to hear. You might be thinking wait - ears aren’t brains. But the way we process sound in our ears is a part of the peripheral nervous system so I say close enough! Come and listen to learn a little bit more about your auditory system, your peripheral nervous system,  hair cells, an...

Social media is omnipresent. Mindless scrolling through TikTok and Instagram reels is just a part of our daily lives now. Whether it's cat videos, funny dances, or cool outfits, online content fills our excess time, entertains us, and keeps us connected with our friends and the people we look up to. As my housemate says, sometimes, we’re living in the REEL world, not the REAL world.  But it&a...

When I was a kid, I thought two things were going to be much bigger problems in my life than they actually are - quicksand and mad cow disease. Turns out that they aren't but mad cow disease is still the stuff of science-fiction nightmares. Mad cow disease is caused by the spread of prions, proteins that weaponize our own cells against us and cause proteins to misfold and aggregate, slowly ki...

For the low, low price of $15.95 on Amazon, you can purchase a little spray bottle of pheromones that supposedly will trigger "animal attraction" in your partner. But is it true??? Pheromones are a well-known system of communicating territory, alarms, and sexual needs to other animals but is this system present in humans? We know that smell is an important component of sexual attraction...

Migraines are PAINFUL! And neuroscience speaking - super cool and complicated.  It involves your blood vessels constricting and dilating and your brain going haywire and spreading a wave of neuron depression across your entire cortex. Sound interesting? Come and take a listen to learn a little bit more about what happens in your brain! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you have any questio...

Itch is... uncomfortable. We've all been there before, one motivated mosquito takes a bite out of you, and you are left with an itchy red spot for a few days that only scratching can temporarily relieve. Have you ever wondered how that sensation is transferred to the brain and processed? How about why pain, like pressing really hard on that mosquito bite makes the itching go away. If the answ...

When two young girls in 1692 started barking like dogs, fevering and convulsing into impossible positions, the deeply Puritan community of Salem, Massachusettes was quick to cry witchcraft. But they could never have envisioned that religious fervor, family feuds, and potentially a hallucinogenic fungus could have resulted in over 200 people being accused of witchcraft and 20 being executed for the...

Inspired by my coworker's tendency to superglue his fingers back together (listen for the full story), this episode dives into the pharmacological and neurological effects of sniffing glue and other recreational inhalants. Listen to learn a little bit more about how it both increases and decreases activity in dopamine neurons, acts on the same receptors as medical anesthetics and destroys the...

ADHD -  attention deficit hyperactivity disorder - is a condition characterized by differences in brain development and brain activity that affect attention, the ability to sit still, and impulse control. It affects millions of children and adults and has far-reaching effects on the lives and well-being of these individuals. And yet we still don't know what going on! Is it genetic? Is it envi...

Synesthesia is a fascinating condition where some people can hear tastes or see letters in color or other crazy combinations of senses. Imagine listening to a Geico commercial and tasting fajitas. Insanity. Could this condition all come down to a genetic mutation that results in some hyperconnectivity between brain regions? Listen to find out more! Please rate, review, and subscribe and if you hav...

We spend a third of our lives sleeping and there is no greater enjoyment than a really good afternoon nap. Back in preschool, the good old days, naps were built into our daily schedules but as adults - not so much. But should they be? Is there any neurological benefit or detriment to taking a nap? Tune in to learn a little bit more about the neuroscience behind sleep, memory, and naps! Please rate...