I joined an online dating site a few months ago.1 Besides being asked about my sun, moon, and rising signs (?), I was puzzled by the following question.2 My love language? I'm supposed to choose only one answer?  Gary Chapman has been a pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, NC for 50 years. In 1992, he published a book based on his experience of advising heterosexual couples on the best ways to have a harmonious marriage. His notion of 5 Love Languages is based on conservative Christian gender roles, although subsequent editions are “less blatantly misogynistic.” Nonethe ..read more

 ...to another platform.   Hi, it's been a while. I haven't written anything this year. My last post was December 31, 2022. The main reason is that I've had to deal with more loss and grief in my life. Someone close to me was diagnosed with cancer, endured months of radiation and chemotherapy, and died anyway.1 I've also had some deflating garbage to wade through at work. My enthusiasm for doing anything has been rather low. Besides all that, Blogger is a terrible platform for blogging. The interface changed a while a back and ever since then, composing in the little box has been ..read more

modified from Franjic et al. (2022). Cross-species comparison shows transcriptomic signatures of neurogenesis in the hippocampus of adult mouse, pig, and monkey — but not human. Does the adult brain generate new neurons throughout the lifespan? The prevailing view in most of the 20th century was that no new neurons are born in the mammalian brain once development ceases. A series of studies in the 1960s showed otherwise, but these were ignored until the 1990s. A now-historical paper from 2000 recounted the death of a dogma: adult neurogenesis is here to stay, even in humans. Thousand of stud ..read more

The second calendar year of COVID surges to a close, and hospital personnel continue their frenetic pace of caring for the infected (most of whom are defiantly unvaccinated). For the rest of us, Vaccine Scientists are the 2021 Heroes of the Year... surely they will outsmart the latest variant of the sneaky virus. Their astonishing achievements built on less glamorous (and less recognized) work conducted over the course of 20 years. As told by Time magazine: In 2005, [Dr. Katalin] Kariko and [Dr. Drew] Weissman reported their findings in what they thought would be a landmark paper in the jour ..read more

Fig. 1 (Fernandes et al., 2017). Domains related to ‘precision psychiatry’. “The right drug for the right patient” was a catch phrase in the early years of the personalized medicine movement (2000), represented by the emerging field of pharmacogenomics. No more “one size fits all” prescribing — the Human Genome Project will allow doctors to predict how you will respond to any given medication. The last time I went to the drug store, I picked up my cheap generic prescription without the benefit of genomic testing. The term “personalized medicine” was outdated by 2011. The National Rese ..read more

The mythology surrounding reverse inter-metamorphosis, a delusional syndrome that involves transformation into a beast, has frightened and fascinated for hundreds of years. A special instance of reverse inter-metamorphosis is clinical lycanthropy, the delusion that one has been transformed into a wolf (or another animal). A recent review identified 43 cases in the literature between 1852 and today (Guessoum et al., 2021). Psychotic depression and schizophrenia were the most common co-existing psychiatric diagnoses in these individuals. The article advocates a cultural and person-centered ..read more

  A fascinating case study from 1907 describes the self-reported sensory “taste” experiences evoked by hearing specific words, names, or sounds (Pierce, 1907). The subject was a young woman about to graduate from college. As far as she could tell, she's always had these experiences, and for most of her life she didn't know they were unusual. This surprise upon discovering the uniqueness of one's one internal experience is similar to what is reported by many contemporary individuals with less typical phenomenology, such as aphantasia (the inability to generate visual images). Pierce noted ..read more

Here's the latest alarming COVID news to distract you from fires and hurricanes. {I'm very sorry if you are experiencing either of these disasters personally. Donations ideas: El Dorado Community Foundation and Red Cross Hurricane Ida campaign.} Caldor Fire: Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group. Hurricane Ida: Edmund D. Fountain/New York Times.   Masklessness Outbreak Associated with SARS-CoV-2 B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant in an Elementary School — Marin County, California, May–June 2021 An unvaccinated elementary school teacher was experiencing nasal congestion and fatigue but continued worki ..read more

WE GET QUESTIONS! Q – “I survived a mild case of COVID. Should I be worried about the volume of gray matter in olfactory-related structures in the left hemisphere of my brain?” A – Most of what you've read on social media may be overstated. One of the scariest things about SARS-CoV-2 (other than possible death) is that it affects multiple organs, including the brain. The vast majority of studies have compared measures in COVID survivors to those obtained from participants without COVID. These cross-sectional studies cannot determine whether pre-existing differences can account for disease ..read more

Feeling starved for affection after 15 months of pandemic-mandated social distancing? Ready to look for a suitable romantic partner by attending an in-person speed dating event? Just recline inside this noisy tube for 10 minutes, think about anything you like, and our algorithm will Predict [the] Compatibility of a Female-Male Relationship! This new study by Kajimura and colleagues garnered a lot of attention on Twitter, where it was publicized by @INM7_ISN (Simon Eickhoff) and @Neuro_Skeptic. The prevailing sentiment was not favorable (check the replies)...   Oha... "Resting-State Con ..read more