A neuronal population has now been found that regulates two competing needs — hunger and pain. Urgent pain overrides hunger, but appetite-inducing neuronal activity dampens long-term pain responses to enable feeding.
Source: nature.com
The hallmark of intelligence is the ability to learn. As decades of research have shown, our brains exhibit a high degree of “plasticity,” meaning that neurons can rewire their connections in response to new stimuli. But researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh have recently discovered surprising constraints on our learning abilities.
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There is a borderland between waking life and the uncharted wilderness of sleep that we all traverse each night, but we rarely stop to marvel at the strangeness of this liminal world. If we do, we find that it is full of hallucinations both wonderful and terrifying, a mental goulash of reality and fantasy.
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