Word: brainful
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That switch may apply to a variety of cravings, such as binge eating or even using heroin or cocaine, say researchers. Why? Because baclofen appears to intercept them at their roots: addiction is driven by the same brain system that motivates people to seek natural pleasures like food and sex. These rewarding experiences trigger the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine - the brain's "do it again" signal. Over time, addicts' brains become narrowly focused on drug-related pleasures and hypersensitive to cues associated with them, such as seeing an old drinking pal. Hanging out with that friend would prompt...
...1880s, some bomb went off in his brain. Ensor started experimenting with pencil drawing, teasing out a jittery, evaporating line that could dissolve form into boiling clouds of light. He applied it for a while to religious subjects weirdly poised between the sacred and the profane. Christ before an uncomprehending contemporary crowd was a favorite. That's also the subject of his most famous painting, Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889. A cartoonish cacophony of marching bands and lurid faces, it's a mob scene straight out of South Park. (Unfortunately it's not included in the MOMA show...
...find that even when we erase prejudice from our conscious mental processing, it lingers in the older, murkier corners of our cognitive architecture. In one experiment, researchers discovered that even subjects who demonstrated no racist attitudes still had increased activity in the amygdala—a part of the brain associated with fear and emotion—when shown images of black faces, and the results of implicit association tests consistently demonstrate that even progressive whites have more difficulty grouping images of African-Americans with positive adjectives than with negative ones. It turns out racism persists, in part, because...
...only are fossil-fuel emissions bad for the planet and for your lungs, but they may also harm your baby's developing brain. A new study published in the journal Pediatrics links mothers' exposure to high levels of environmental pollutants during pregnancy to a four-point drop in children's IQ scores...
Precisely how PAHs might harm the developing brain is unclear, though more than one mechanism may be at work. "We know from many studies that the developing fetal brain is particularly vulnerable to neurotoxic chemicals," says Perera. "One of the reasons is that it is rapidly developing. The defense mechanisms present in the adult are not present in the fetus: these include detoxification and repair enzymes." Exposure to pollution could cause direct genetic damage or epigenetic changes, which are changes in how genes are expressed...