Here is what I am reading today:
““There is a kind of alchemy in the transformation of base chocolate into this wise fool’s-gold, a layman’s magic that even my mother might have relished… The mingled scents of chocolate, vanilla, heated copper, and cinnamon are intoxicating, powerfully suggestive; the raw and earthy tang of the Americas, the hot and resinous perfume of the rain forest. This is how I travel now, as the Aztecs did in their sacred rituals… The Food of the Gods, bubbling and frothing in ceremonial goblets. The bitter elixir of life.” – Chocolat”
“The moment we open our eyes, we perceive the world with apparent ease. But the question of how neurons in the retina encode what we “see” has been a tricky one. A key obstacle to understanding how our brain functions is that its components — neurons — respond in highly nonlinear ways to complex stimuli, making stimulus-response relationships extremely difficult to discern.”
“Children suffering from extreme social anxiety are trapped in a nightmare of misinterpreted facial expressions: They confuse angry faces with sad ones, a new study shows.”
“Adult mice engineered to have more newborn neurons in their brain memory hub excelled at accurately discriminating between similar experiences — an ability that declines with normal aging and in some anxiety disorders. Boosting such neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus also produced antidepressant-like effects when combined with exercise, in the study funded by the National Institutes of Health.”
“An ingenious set of experiments has teased apart the mind-altering and pain-relieving effects of the main component of cannabis. This could open the way to cannabis-like drugs that provide pain relief without causing unwanted highs.
Cannabis is taken as a painkiller – to dull pain in cancer for example – but it can produce unpleasant side effects such as hallucinations and impaired mobility.”
