Over the summer I had a pleasure of participating in one of the most inspiring ventures in academia. I took part in my first summer school during the first year of my PhD journey. It has also been the first year after lockdowns, so one could freely travel and scientific […]
A short PhD student journey If we look at people’s curriculum vitae (CV) /résumés and career paths, we might think: Wow…their life runs smoothly. However, what we don’t see, and what, of course, no one usually mentions, are the many mistakes and failures. Let’s just dive right into one chapter […]
Open science. This term has been thrown around quite a lot lately. You have seen that hashtag on Twitter. But there is something odd about it, isn’t it? What is “open science”? “Open” as in open-minded, seeking new ideas? “Open” as in transparent, not lying, not hiding any failed experiments? […]
First of all, I am no philosopher, I only have some notions and I will (mostly) rely on these. Now, why am I talking about philosophy all of a sudden? Because I will question the concept of academic freedom, which overlaps greatly with the concept of freedom, unsurprisingly. Freedom has […]
We live in a simulated world, carefully created from scratch by our own brains. The “scratch” consists of neural activity influenced by our sensory input. Have you ever imagined how a mouse perceives the world? What does a rainbow look like for a mouse? While the actual rainbow seems to […]
Some questions in science are grandiose and tackle issues of great social impact, like: how can we cure cancer? Others are less flamboyant, but not necessarily less important. For example, a question that is the focus of my PhD is how neurons code and relay the acoustic information. Literature describes […]
I was not able to contain zombies to one part and they spread to a second part. This time, I am tackling the more classical zombie apocalypse, the one where zombies are not created on purpose… a pandemic of some sort if you will. To start of, let us dive […]
Zombies? What can we learn about science with the help of zombies? Quite a lot, that is. Which zombies did I include? Few. Not so many zombies come with wannabe scientific explanations, but more than enough to learn about morbid themes. Make sure you can handle gruesome things before you […]
I first started to question my love of science about 3 months into my PhD. There I sat, alone and late at night. Our lab was small and, 6 weeks after my arrival, the PhD who should have been my real mentor had left, an industry position shining bright in […]
Time passes by and it has been more than 10 years that James Cameron introduced the blue aliens to the silver screen. More than 10 years that Avatar has been out and whenever someone speaks about it, I still have this song playing loudly in my mind (click on the […]
I was raised by wonderful people, who every time they were encouraged to learn something new used to repeat a slightly modified version of the known saying: “You can’t teach new tricks to an old dog”. Fun fact: The Latin-American version of this idiom is: “Chango viejo no aprende maroma […]
“We have our strategy in place. A behavior has occurred one that is reprehensible, or wonderful, or floating ambiguously in between. What occurred in the prior second that triggered the behavior? This is the province of the nervous system. What occurred in the prior seconds to minutes that triggered the […]
One of my earliest exposures to Neuroscience was when I read famous DNA scientist, Francis Crick’s book titled “The astonishing hypothesis”, in which he elegantly posited: “You—your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will—are in fact no more than the […]
For this past 8th of March, marked as International Women’s Day 2021, the SimpleNeuro team decided to commemorate this day by challenging many things. We uploaded pictures to our Instagram page in which we talked about topics we need to challenge. Here’s a recap: Katrina decided to talk about the […]
I like the implication of such a title : The Real Life. So there would be a life that is not real? Not real enough? That was, at least, the question stuck in my head when I started reading this LabLit book from Brandon Taylor. First, I want to address […]
Did you ever wonder if you could control an artificial arm? And that this artificial arm could also give feedback back to you about what you feel. For instance, a hot cup of coffee or an ice cube. To realize such approaches in the future, the brain’s basic understanding and […]
Start small. We don’t expect a fully developed article or piece of art. Here are our proposed contributions: Send an interview Q&A to someone you look up to and write a post with their responses. Write about your career development plans Write about something interesting in neuroscience or your specific […]
In the last few years there has been quite a surge of texts discussing psychological challenges of academic careers at a graduate level, particularly regarding the rates of depression among PhD students, and impostor syndrome. But what about those of us who made it through? With all the antidepressants we […]
A few late experiments, some more words typed for the publication or the thesis, a couple of fixes on that analysis, turning off the devices in the lab, and finally heading home on Christmas Eve 2020… Many of us did not travel back to our home-countries, everything is special this […]
Oh boy. I knew this day was coming, the day when I would have to address the elephant in the room full of films with bits of science. Which elephant are we talking about? Well, I think you have already read the title and know we are going to take […]
Today is a bit of a different topic. Generally, I like to discover whether or not some media are scientifically relevant. Most of the time, science is bent in unusual ways to fit the world or scenario. Sometimes it is just bent. I could also say that some people are […]
The vivid redness of a rose, the soothing sound of the waves and the sweet blissful flavor of chocolate in your mouth—these are all sensations that we are familiar with. From a scientific perspective, these constitute stimuli that the brain can comprehend and manifest into a plethora of emotions that […]
So today is a bit special. Confinement and social distancing make it easier to think about oneself and guess what, this introspective mood also got to me. Just like everyone at some point in their life, I started wondering how I got to where I am; meaning doing a PhD […]
Thoughts during the self-quarantine period… # Find accurate knowledge Among the anxiety and distress of a new pandemic, misinformation is easy to come by. Some say that the COVID-19 has been made into a bigger hype than needful because of social media and sensationalism news. Let’s clarify that. Free access […]
Evolution is a film about, you guessed it, a famous shampoo brand. Any other idea would be preposterous. Who in their right mind would say that Evolution is a film about evolution? Well, I do. You do too, don’t you? As a first point, I would like to say that […]
Dr. Esther Kühn is a group leader at the Institute for Cognitive Neurology and Dementia Research (IKND). She regularly writes science communication articles for InMind—check out Why are we creative, Wenn sich das Gehirn selbst zerstört, and Warum Altern glücklich macht among other articles. Her group’s research focuses on Microstructural […]
With the recent kick-off meeting of the jNWG at the LIN, I took the opportunity to interview Dr. Sophie Seidenbecher, one of the core members of the initiative. The purpose of this was to get to know her a little bit better and hear her take on the importance of […]
Science/Fiction is a regular column that looks at error made by books, films and others whenever they include some science in their plot. This episode contains spoilers for Pacific Rim, obviously. Somehow, in films, aliens rarely come to Earth in peace. This is one more time the case in “Pacific […]
![[:en]https://www.redbubble.com/people/kdeane/works/41188219-nests-in-cerebellum?asc=u[:]](https://simpleneuro.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Neuronclip-570x350.png)
I’m currently doing my PhD in the lab where I also completed a Master’s thesis. A Master’s project is generally short and succinct so that a student, an inexperienced researcher, can do the project and write it up all within 6 months to hopefully less than a year. Sometimes the […]
Imagine you have to cross the Niagara Falls on an unsteady high wire. You may ask yourself ‘why?’ or ‘what do I get from it?’, but instead ignore those questions and just do it. You feel your legs getting shaky, your hands getting sweaty and your heart beating louder than […]
Friday the 13th of September: It was early in the evening. Where most of the traffic was moving out of the Leibniz institute… there was a smaller stream of inward bound bodies. These were the so described “enthusiastic neuroscientists with a little extra time” (underlined because, lets face it, finding […]
A life full of questions…every day we ask questions and we answer to others. This is how we learn, communicate, evolve and live. Have you ever counted the question marks in a day (here, another one)? The questions have some weights. Sometimes they are trivial or rhetorical but eventually, they […]
There is a slowly growing push from politics into anti-intellectualism. That is – that the instincts of the political leaders are more correct in a given field of science than the experts who spent their lives in ivory towers to understand their field. Distrust of science is starting to have […]
Science/Fiction is a regular column that looks at error made by books, films and others whenever they include some science in their plot. Ladies and gentlemen, scientists are great people. I come across scientists every day, I met scientists from all over the world and all horizons, so I think […]