Neurofrontiers

“There’s a feeling I love almost more than anything: the feeling of sinking into a good book while the world around me fades away. My breathing slows, my shoulders drop, and the mental chatter in the back of my mind goes quiet. […] Reading uses some of the oldest circuitry in the human brain. For most of our evolutionary history, we were readers - just not of books. We read animal tracks in mud, storm patterns in clouds, danger signals in the rustle of leaves.” Interesting read on reading: https://bigthink.com/mind-behavior/how-reading-books-regulates-your-nervous-system/ #reading #neuroscience

Day 2: It's likely that you've heard about Jane Goodall by now. She was a pioneer in studying the behavior of primates and demonstrated that chimpanzees share many traits with humans (like using tools or passing down knowledge from generation to generation). But did you know that she was also the first to assign names to chimps instead of numbering them? The latter was standard practice as it avoided anthropomorphizing the animals, so her decision to name them was highly controversial at the time. In the end, it worked out. To date, she remains the only human ever accepted into the chimp society. #ShyButSharing365 #chimpanzees #goodall #monkey #ethology #society

Day 4: "Brain fog" has a "foggy" definition. The term is used to describe symptoms across multiple disorders, from fibromyalgia to long Covid to hypothyroidism, but it's unclear whether this is the same symptom with a shared neurobiological mechanism or multiple ones bundled into the same definitional trenchcoat. Why would that matter though? Because what's not properly defined cannot be properly operationalized, i.e. it makes it difficult to study, understand, and treat. (This post has been inspired by a particularly rough allergy day. Because where's the fun in life if the air isn't trying to kill you sometimes? For a more scientific coverage of the topic, I found this article interesting: https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/fulltext/S0166-2236(25)00017-7) #ShyButSharing365 #neuroscience #brain #brainfog #foggy

Day 3: Remaining on the topic of chimpanzees, it seems that among their many similarities to humans is also their ability to engage in organized warfare. I find the topic quite sad, so won't expand on it here, but if you'd like to know more, I'll leave the Wiki links to two prominent chimpanzee wars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngogo_chimpanzee_war #ShyButSharing365 #behaviour #ethology #chimpanzees #war #warfare

@stepheneb@ruby.social Happy to hear! I’ve not written about that yet, but I’ve just added it to the list. Will do a short post about it in the next days and hopefully a longer one at some point, it’s really a fascinating topic.

@jonny oh, this is very sad…