neuroscience

In 1688, the Irish scientist William Molyneux posed the following problem in a letter to John Locke: if a person blind from birth acquires sight in adulthood and looks at a cube and a sphere, geometric figures that he previously knew how to recognize and name thanks to touch Would he be able to distinguish with his eyes what he already knew how to identify with his hands?

Ghrelin, a stomach hormone known to stimulate appetite and fat storage, also increases our sense of smell to locate food.

Does alcohol help you forget? Quite the opposite. According to a study by the Wagoner Center for Alcohol and Addiction Research at the University of Texas (USA), drinking alcohol stimulates areas of our brain involved in learning and memory.

The transcendental meditation technique could help improve academic performance in mathematics and English in students with low grades, according to a study by the Maharishi University of Management in California (USA) published in the journal 'Education'.

Lack of sleep encourages risky decisions due to an excess of optimism, according to a study by the Duke University Medical Center in Durham (United States) published in the latest issue of the journal 'Journal of Neuroscience'.

Swedish neuroscientists have shown that it is possible to make a person experience the sensation of having three arms at the same time. The researchers do not rule out that people in demanding jobs could benefit from an extra arm, such as firefighters in rescue operations.

Sex and violence are interconnected in the brain of mice. The activity of a small group of neurons in the ventromedial hypothalamus region of the male brain determines whether a fight or sexual intercourse occurs, and there is good reason to believe that humans have a similar circuitry, according to a published study. in the scientific journal 'Nature'.

The human brain is capable of adapting to the unexpected thanks to the fact that it has a network of neurons that makes predictions about the world around us and also monitors how accurate those predictions are. The core of this network is found in the so-called orbitofrontal cortex.