Fear Memory

Amygdala is an almond shape region in the brain which has a crucial role in fear or emotional memory. This image is a close look of this region that I took with a Leica microscope just recently.
These are the neurons that got beautifully activated by a fear stimulus in the amygdala of a genetically engineered mouse brain. The bright yellow fluorescence is like a reporter saying which neurons were involved. It's very important to see what is it that some neurons can be activated because of the trigger and the other not. What are the factors that make them different from each other.
The method that we just started to use is new and seems promising. What you can see under the microscope is astonishing, really amazing!

Pink Brain Blue Brain

Sounds a fascinating book! Lise Eliot the author gave a talk on the book; quite fantastic I think.

Are Better Brains Better?

What you think?

Life of a mind

My train trips these days are devoted to reading a book titled "In search of memory" by Eric Kandel. It's the story of a refugee kid of Nazis-era, a husband, a father, a man and a Nobel prize winner.
And my sharing for today from this book:
...But the argument with Denise about spending more time with her and Paul did cause me to pause and think. As a consequence I learned from this argument the obvious lesson that hard thinking, especially if it leads to even one useful idea, is much more valuable than simply running more experiments. I was later reminded of a comment made about Jim Watson by Marx Perutz, the Viennese-born British structural biologist: "Jim never made the mistake of confusing hard work with hard thinking".

How we read each other's minds

"The real" and fantasy

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

Cultural cache of Neuroscience