During the pandemic, I have to take online courses as an international student. Since I have a different time zone from eastern standard time, it’s very hard for me to stay a healthy life style. Initially, I tried to take melatonin to help with my sleep. However, it didn’t work so well. When I was…
What is Reality?
Our brains are easily tricked by simple drawings, pictures, and works of art. Sometimes we may see objects that are absent and other times, we may fail to see objects that are present. Our brain constructs our reality by taking in information collected from our senses and transforming them into a world based on its…
Cinematography on the Brain
Picture this: a magnificent shot of an amber sunrise illuminating the sandy specks on a beach, or even a simple frame of a coffee cup on a breakfast table. What is it that makes a visual look as if it was “straight out of a movie”? The answer can be summed up by one word:…
Mysterious Dreams
Everyone has some interesting experience with dreams since we spent one-third of our lives sleeping. Some are scary, some gives you warmth, while some even inspires the dreamer about future goals or career. For me, I rarely have nightmares or inspirational dreams, most of them are simply non-sense like imaginary star wars with the people…
Lucid Dreaming and Creativity
Dreaming can get very complicated, especially lucid dreaming. In seventh grade, my friends and I started a club dedicated to learning Spanish, called the Hablaba Club. We joked around, talking about how we could improve membership if we created our own clothing merchandise. Later that night, when I fell asleep, I realized that I was…
Alzheimer’s Disease: A Worldwide Crisis
Ever since I was young, there have always been instances of neurodegenerative disease in my family. My great-uncle has suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years and though Parkinson’s is very debilitating, he has lived with it for a quite a while and embraces it as a part of his identity. He continues to live…
Cerebral Achromatopsia
Resulting from the trauma of cerebral cortex, cerebral achromatopsia is a special form of color-blindness that is subtly different from other kinds of color-blindness. However, such subtle difference is indispensable since the cortical damage it involves is from infarction of a specific area in the ventral occipitotemporal cortex of humans which always results in injury or illness….
Night Blindness
As I entered my teen years, I was so excited to start driving. As expected, I loved the freedom it made me feel. As I started driving more often at night however, I realized I didn’t like it so much. I sometimes had a harder time seeing. It felt like the lights from oncoming traffic…
How do we tell if something is beautiful
Thinking about arts and learning about the relationship between arts and the brain make me wonder several questions: what it means when people say you have a good taste; why do we feel amused going to art galleries; and how do we know if something is beautiful? A word jumped out of my mind when…
Let’s Talk About Pain
Do you understand our sensation of pain? Before everything, the pain I’m talking about today is physical, not some types of emotional pain you feel after a huge fight or a breakup. Speaking of physical pain, we usually tend to relate them to injuries – well, that’s partially correct. Let’s try and understand pain from…