a-science-blog

Neuroscientists Explain How the Sensation of Brain Freeze Works
The scientific term for brain freeze is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. Brain freeze is your body’s way of putting on the brakes, telling you to slow down and take it easy. Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center neuroscientist Dwayne Godwin, Ph.D., explains how it works.

“Brain freeze is really a type of headache that is rapid in onset, but rapidly resolved as well,” he said. “Our mouths are highly vascularized, including the tongue — that’s why we take our temperatures there. But drinking a cold beverage fast doesn’t give the mouth time to absorb the cold very well.”
When you drink a really cold drink or eat ice cream too fast you are rapidly changing the temperature in the back of the throat at the juncture of the internal carotoid artery, which feeds blood to the brain, and the anterior cerebral artery, which is where brain tissue starts.
“One thing the brain doesn’t like is for things to change, and brain freeze is a mechanism to prevent you from doing that,” Godwin said.
The brain can’t actually feel pain despite its billions of neurons, Godwin said, but the pain associated with brain freeze is sensed by receptors in the outer covering of the brain called the meninges, where the two arteries meet. When the cold hits, it causes a dilation and contraction of these arteries and that’s the sensation that the brain is interpreting as pain.
Read More

3 notes

[by nature-gifs ]

A jellyfish hunting in deep ocean

(via abluegirl)

133 notes

matthen:

In 1952 Alan Turing, a british mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist, wrote a paper which remains influential in computational biology today. He explained how stripes might form on a snake’s skin [and other patterns on animals], using the dispersion of two chemicals; an activator [red] and an inhibitor [yellow]. The activator causes the colouration, and the inhibitor inhibits it. Turing wrote a pair of equations which say that concentrations of the activator cause creation of more inhibitor, but that the inhibitor diffuses and spreads out more quickly than the activator. As shown in the animation, this causes the activator to form peaks with surrounding basins of inhibitor. The concentrations of the two chemicals quickly converge to a stripey pattern where the red activator is periodically in higher concentration than the yellow inhibitor. [video] [more] [code]

195 notes

jtotheizzoe:

You’re looking at a brain. But not really.
Connectograms are an intersection of data, neuroscience, design and art. This represents the inter-brain-region connections of 110 right-handed men, with various color codes indicated to show how strong those connections are in various ways. The Wikipedia page can decode the regions around the edge for you.
Studying the wiring of the brain is essential to understanding it. But it is not sufficient to understand it. We love to share beautiful images of brain mapping studies (I do it all the time), but relying on mapping alone is like clicking through Google Maps and saying you’ve been to Paris.
There’s just something missing, right? And that something is us. Except that we must be in there, because we can’t exist outside of that. But why can’t we distill our “us-ness” from the map of all the pieces?
But does this map show you a brain? Does it show you a person? What’s the difference?

1,176 notes

Brain Decides Which Ear Is Used for Cell Phone

According to a newly published study from Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, if you’re a left-brain thinker, chances are you use your right hand to hold your cell phone up to your right ear.

Left-brain dominant people — who account for about 95% of the population and have their speech and language center located on the left side of the brain — are more likely to use their right hand for writing and other everyday tasks.