#basic neuroscience

The Consequences of Childhood Abuse Last Until Adulthood-What are the Implications for Society? #neuroscience #policy

(© Derek Simon 2015) One of the great questions in the addiction field is why do some people become full-blown addicts while other people can use drugs occasionally without progressing to anything more serious? One part the answer definitely has to do with the drug itself. For example, heroin causes a more intensely pleasurable high than cocaine and people that try heroin are more likely to…

Childhood Abuse Has Long-lasting Effects on Brain Function #addiction #research #fMRI #imaging #neuroscience #stress #cocaine

(© Derek Simon 2015)   Why is it that one person becomes an addict and another does not? This is a central question in addiction field and one that I’ve touched on in some of my posts (and will continue to explore in the future). Two recent papers may help to shed more light on this difficult and complicated question. Both studies have revealed changes that occur in the brain as a result of…

New blog post featuring article on Optogenetics in the New Yorker. #neuroscience #optogenetics #research #scicomm

Excellent new article on optogenetics in The New Yorker. Optogenetics is a powerful, cutting-edge tool developed by Karl Deisseroth’s lab (profiled in the article) and is one of most significant advances in neuroscience research in decades. I recently spent two months learning the technique and we will be implementing it in the lab I work in at Rockefeller University. Optogenetics allows…

New blog post! The Scientist’s Toolbox: Techniques in Addiction Research, Part 2 #addiction #scicomm #research

When a news article starts with the headline “A new study finds…” do you know what that means? The article is (allegedly) referring to a peer-reviewed scientific research paper. Research papers are the heart of the scientific research field and are a report of a series of experiments conducted by a scientist or team of scientists. In a future post, I’ll do a break down what a paper looks like…

New blog post! Stress and Addiction Part 3: Molecular Changes #addiction #stress #research

This is part three on my series of posts looking at Stress and Addiction. To recap: we’ve seen that, in laboratory studies, stress increases susceptibility to drug addiction. Stress not only increases the self-administration of drugs in adult rats but stress during an early age can have a long-lasting effect on drug-taking behavior. Today, we’ll wrap up by looking at some molecular changes that…

New blog post! The Science of Stress and Addiction: A Mini-review of the Research, Part 1 #addiction #research

Why does one person become an addict and another person does not?

The vulnerability/susceptibility to addiction is one of the most important questions in the addiction field and also one of most difficult to answer. Is it genetics, the environment, or the addictive power of the drug itself? Spoiler alert: the answer is all three! But rather than trying to explainthe answer in mere blog post…

The Scientist’s Toolbox: Techniques in Addiction Research, Part 1 #neuroscience #addiction #research #scicomm

(Image © Derek Simon 2015)

One of the most important questions that every scientist learns to ask is “How do you know that…?” As scientists, we are trained to be skeptical. When we consider a bit of research done by a colleague, before we are inclined to believe the data,  we need to be sure that they conducted the right experiments and that those experiments were done correctly. This doesn’t…

Today, I discuss the synapse and neurotransmitters. Enjoy! #neuroscience #SciComm #addiction Synapse to it

Synaptic ultrastructure-electron microscopy image . Palade, de Robertis, and Bennett. 1954

Using the technique of electron microscopy, this is one of the first images ever taken that proved that the neurons do not physically touch. The space between the junctions of neurons is called the synapse and the work of Palade, de Robertis, and Bennett definitively proved this, thus validating the initial…