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Why Do You Like What You Like?

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Why Do You Like What You Like? Have you ever sat at a table and wondered how two people can eat the exact same food and have completely different reactions? One person bites into cilantro and swears it tastes like soap. Another finds it fresh and delicious. Some people can’t live without black coffee, while others wince at the first sip. It feels personal, almost like taste is part of identity. But it all starts with the same thing: taste buds. Taste buds are tiny sensory organs on the tongue that detect the basic flavours: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Each one is a little cluster of receptor cells that send signals to the brain when certain molecules land on them. The wiring is the same in everyone, yet the experience is not. So why do our plates look so different? Why do some people love anchovies and others gag at the thought? Part of the answer is genetic. Variations in certain genes can change how strongly we perceive bitterness, sweetness, or certain flavour compounds....
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The People Who Believe They Are Dead

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  The People Who Believe They Are Dead There’s a psychiatric condition so strange it almost sounds like a ghost story. People who have it insist that they are dead. Not metaphorically. Not depressed and saying “I feel dead inside.” They mean it literally. This is “ Cotard’s delusion ”, sometimes called walking corpse syndrome. Imagine looking in the mirror and being convinced that what you see is just an empty shell. Some patients believe their organs have rotted away, or that their blood is gone, or that their body is nothing but a corpse they happen to be carrying around. Others say they have already died, and the world they’re living in is some kind of afterlife. The first time I read about it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how terrifying it must feel… To wake up and believe you don’t even exist anymore. Like most delusions, Cotard’s syndrome doesn’t have one simple cause. It often appears in people with severe depression, psychotic disorders, or neurological conditions. ...
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The Man Who Froze Without the Cold

The Man Who Froze Without the Cold There’s this story that haunts me. A man gets trapped inside a refrigerated train container. He panics. He knows what happens in these things: freezing, numbness, the slow shutting down of the body. So he starts to write it down, leaving notes about how his hands are getting stiff, how his breathing is slowing, how the cold is swallowing him. When they find him, he’s dead. But here is the twist: the container wasn’t even cold. That detail always gets me. These containers only stay freezing when they are plugged in and powered. Once they are empty and unplugged, they drift back to normal temperature. This one should have been harmless. His body should have been fine. And yet, it wasn’t. So what killed him? -------- We usually think of the brain as an organ for thought, but it is more than that. It doesn’t just process reality, it can create it. Sometimes it even creates it so convincingly that the body plays along. The nocebo effect is one example. M...
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NeuroNugget 2: You See the World Upside Down

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  You See the World Upside Down But Your Brain Flips It Here’s something weird. You’re seeing this sentence upside down. Not in a metaphorical way. Literally. When light enters your eyes, it bends through your lens and lands on the back of your eyeball inverted. The top becomes the bottom, the left becomes the right. So why doesn’t the world look upside down? Because your brain is quietly fixing it for you. 👁️ Your Eyes Flip It. Your Brain Fixes It :) Your eyes are like little cameras. The lenses bend light and project the image onto the retina, which is the back of your eye. But thanks to how lenses work, the image ends up upside down and reversed. That’s normal. It happens to everyone. It’s just physics. But you don’t see an upside-down world. Why? Because your brain knows how to handle it.  It’s been doing it since you were a baby. Your brain doesn’t flip the image like turning a photo. Instead, it understands the world based on context, memory, and experience. The visual ...
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NeuroNugget 1 - Your Brain Doesn’t Sleep All at Once... It Sleeps in Waves 🧠

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Your Brain Doesn’t Sleep All at Once…It Sleeps in Waves We like to think of sleep as an “off” switch” : lights out, brain down, and everything goes quiet. But here’s the truth: Your brain never fully shuts off. Not even in your deepest sleep. 1- Sleep Isn’t a Full Brain Shutdown When you go to sleep, your brain doesn’t just power down. Some parts/regions enter rest mode. While others stay active : sorting memories, regulating your heartbeat, even watching out for danger. So you’re unconscious... but your brain is actually pretty active doing all sort of things. 2- Local Sleep: Tiny Parts of the Brain take a Nap Here’s where it gets a bit crazy😏 Local sleep is when small clusters of neurons take naps while the rest of your brain is awake. This can happen when you’re sleep deprived. You might feel alert, but different parts of your brain are sneakily going offline (Just for a couple of seconds). Ever made a really silly mistake, or zoned out for no reason? That could’ve been your brain...
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