The popular party drug MDMA – or ecstasy – may ‘reopen’ narrow windows in the brain that allows us to re-learn better social behaviors, new research suggests. MDMA has been given breakthrough therapy status by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because it has shown such promise for treating PTSD. Scientists have observed the way … Read more
Bird-brained: Parrots and crows have evolved ‘truly exceptional’ brain sizes while pigeons and emus have the same brain-to-body ratio as dinosaurs did 66 million years ago Birds and dinosaurs had similar brain sizes around 66million years ago After the mass extinction of the dinosaurs birds evolved relatively bigger brains Body size of some birds got … Read more
Rita Wilson has spoken about her painful coronavirus experience, saying she suffered brain fog for weeks after she was diagnosed with husband Tom Hanks. The singer and producer, 63, told Steve Wright on BBC Radio 2 she tried to test her memory by reciting the lyrics for Naughty by Nature’s Hip Hop Hooray during recovery, … Read more
Some coronavirus patients may suffer brain damage as a result of the devastating infection, doctors around the world are warning. One Florida patient in his 70s lost the ability to speak at least temporarily, The New York Times reported. Brain scans of a woman in her 50s taken in Detroit revealed that some of her … Read more
Having won two gold medals in the 2017 under-18 kayaking world cup when she was just 15, it’s fair to say Georgia Carmichael was in peak condition. But just six weeks after the event, she was struck down with searing headaches, chronic fatigue and an unbearable sensitivity to bright lights. Within months, she had suffered a … Read more
During my 30 years on television as a BBC reporter, I’ve handled some quite extraordinary things. But nothing quite compared to the spongy, heavy mass of a real brain. I had the privilege of standing among a sea of them two months ago during my visit to one of the UK’s few ‘brain banks’. Just 48 … Read more
A teenager described the coronavirus test like ‘being stabbed in the brain’ as her viral video shows a testing swab being forced several inches into her nostril. Shelby, from Utah, went to a drive-thru testing centre in the US and posted footage of her experience on Tik Tok which has since amassed millions of views. … Read more
MISCELLANY UNCOMMON KNOWLEDGE by Tom Standage (Economist £8.99, 272 pp) This is what Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist, calls ‘a compendium of explanations’. It’s uncommon knowledge in two senses of the word: in the normal sense of ‘rare or infrequently encountered’, and also as in the meaning ‘exceptional and extraordinary’. In short, it’s … Read more
Spending months in space changes the brain and can increase the risk of developing brain damage and dementia, a new study revealed. Researchers from the University of Texas studied brain scans of astronauts a year after they returned from the International Space Station for signs of damage. The lack of gravity experienced by humans in … Read more
Coronavirus ‘harms the brain and nervous system of HALF of severely ill patients and a third of all cases’ — causing symptoms such as stumbling, slurred speech and seizures Neurologists studied 214 patients treated for coronavirus in Wuhan, China Of these people, 36.4 per cent were found to have brain and nerve symptoms Identifying these symptoms … Read more