A bad spoon
Her name is Hikari, and if you met her, you would remember it. She’s a lady, but the vet happily reminds me that she’s built like a man. One of the techs once joked that I must have a Maine coon when she took the carrier she’s so big and heavy. But those are more recent memories, and if we want to talk about the bad spoon, I should probably start at the beginning, like any good storyteller. The first thing you need to realize is that I’m not a cat person. I prefer dogs, in all honesty. However, I can barely take care of myself, much less others. This fact, combined with the small yard space I purposefully have due to the lower maintenance requirements, led me to conclude that it would be cruel to have a dog. Or any pet, frankly. Sometimes fate plays tricks.
(more…)The things I carried
In the face of time, even rocks wear away to nothing. How many things will you love that just pop in and out of existence over the course of your life? I don’t mean people; I mean literal things. Photographs, stuffed animals, or mementos of things long past. Things with sentimental value rather than actual value. If I were to take an inventory of the things I own, most would have come into my possession in the last 10 years or so. The oldest would be a photo album from when I was born, and the second oldest would be a scattering of my Marine Corps-issued gear. There’s a large gap of time between those two things, but for good… and bad reasons.
(more…)Research team may have observed building blocks of memories in the brain
A team of researchers has observed what they believe are the building blocks of memories in a mouse brain. In their paper, the researchers describe how they caused certain neurons to become illuminated when they fired, allowing them to watch in real time as memories were made and then later as they were replayed while the mouse was sitting idle.
Fear Factor- How it Works in the Brain
What are you afraid of? Like it or not your brain knows and now, scientists are starting to understand how it does it.
Scientists at Columbia University in New York have found the neurons responsible for preventing mice from forming fearful memories by looking at a part of the brain called the hippocampus [no, that isn’t where hippos go for an education; yes, that was a awful attempt at a joke].
Lunatic Laboratories 