NeuroNuggets

Sometimes a thought just appears.  You are walking, brushing your teeth, staring at nothing in particular and suddenly it’s there.  Something cruel. Something embarrassing.  Something frightening. Something that makes you stop and think, why would I even think that ? The strangest part is not the content of the thought…It’s the timing. You didn’t invite it, you didn’t decide to think it. It just showed up.  So where did it come from?  We like to believe we are in charge of our thoughts. That we choose them, generate them, approve them. But if you pay close attention, that belief falls apart very quickly. Thoughts do not arrive with a knock. They don’t ask for permission. They emerge fully formed, already in your head and only then do you become aware of them.  This is because thinking does not start in consciousness. It starts in the dark.  Before you ever “hear” a thought, your brain has already done the work. Networks deep inside are constantly predi...

There is something strange about being human that we never think about. Your brain has never touched the outside world. Not once.  It sits in complete darkness inside your skull, floating in fluid, locked away from light, sound, textures, colours, everything.  And yet somehow it builds an entire universe for you.  It convinces you that you can see a sunset or hear a song or feel the wind. But non of these sensations reach you in the form you think they do. Your brain receives nothing but electrical signals from your senses and uses them to construct its best guess of what is happening out there.  Your world isn’t out there. It is in here, inside your head.  Sometimes the best way to understand this is through illusions.  There is one called the checker shadow illusion. Two squares on a chessboard look like completely different colours, even though they are the exact same shade. You can check the pixels, you can isolate the squares, it doesn’t matter.  ...

  There is a certain kind of love that feels like gravity. You know it is pulling you somewhere dangerous, somewhere you probably shouldn’t go…but your body leans toward it anyway. You tell yourself you can stop whenever you want. You tell yourself you are in control. But something inside you keeps walking back to that Person who hurst you more than they heal you.  And the strangest part is that it feels familiar, almost comforting.  People always ask the same question : Why do we fall for people who are bad for us? Why do we stay? Why do our brains get hooked on someone who makes us feel small, confused and unsteady?  The answer isn’t just emotional. It’s biological. The brain is doing something very old, very primitive and powerful.  It starts with unpredictability.  Healthy love feels steady. You know where you stand. But the toxic kind is all about inconsistencies. One moment they are warm, affectionate, almost addictive. The next moment they pull away ...

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....

  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. ...

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...