You’re working late on a deadline when someone emails about an urgent meeting tomorrow. Within seconds, your body prepares you for action and your cortisol levels rise. Cortisol isn’t inherently problematic; it’s a sophisticated chemical messenger that helped our ancestors survive countless threats. Yet in today’s environment this evolutionary advantage has become a potential liability. … Read More
In a world that often feels like it’s moving at breakneck speed, it’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of everyday stress and distractions, and forget about the simple pleasures that can brighten our days. But the key to happiness lies in the small, seemingly insignificant moments that make up our lives. From … Read More
Despite its small size compared to the rest of the body, the human brain consumes a lot of energy, consuming about 20% of the body’s resources. This energy is vital for maintaining the brain’s complex functions such as thinking, memory, and controlling the body. Neuroenergetics is a specialized area of research that aims to understand how the brain manages this energy.
We all have goals. They can be big or small; professional or personal. But obstacles get in the way. External obligations such as social events, unforeseen additional work, and demanding customers can drain our energy, so there’s little left to focus on what really matters to us. If only that was the only issue. To … Read More
Lists of exercises to rewire your brain, books about the “plastic” brain… Neuroplasticity has been touted as a magical capability anyone can harness for success. As with many neuroscience-based concepts that made it into mainstream media, the hype starts from a fact: it is true that the adult brain is not hard-wired with fixed neuronal … Read More
People think, learn, behave, and experience the world around them in many different ways. Some of this diversity is due to neurological differences. Neurodiversity refers to those variations in neurocognitive functioning. Let’s have a look at the origin of the term, and its usefulness in research and practice. A short primer on neurodiversity The term … Read More
Did you know that the more you are interested in how the brain works, the more likely you are to believe in neuromyths? Neuromyths are common misconceptions about the brain. Their source can be innocent — people who genuinely believe in those myths — or plain unethical, such as the case of marketers promoting brain … Read More
There are many different fields of research in neuroscience. Molecular and cellular neuroscience explores how neurons express and respond to molecular signals, and how they process signals at a physiological and electrochemical level. Cognitive and behavioural neuroscience explores the neurobiological processes that underlie cognition and behaviour. Computational neuroscience uses mathematical models to understand the features … Read More
As I was chatting with a friend, we noticed that we both felt incredibly excited and anxious about the work we were currently doing. We could not come up with the right word to describe that exact feeling: we were stressed, yes, but not in a negative way. We did worry about the outcome of … Read More
We take the way we see the world for granted. But our experience of the world is shaped in part by our visual system—which is both extremely complex and limited. Impossible colors, which are sometimes called non-physical colors, are a great reminder to not consider our perception of the visual world the only possible experience. … Read More