Sorry about the little red markings, trying to censor sensitive information. I love these!

Please enjoy this embroidery project that I finished for my neuro lab’s gift exchange!

I love combining my love for science and embroidery. I just created an instagram account to share all of my work. I’ll post on that more regularly! If you’re interested in following, it’s @neuroneedlework

Happy Holidays!

It’s this mental health crisis we’re living through. It’s getting really bad and noticeable. People are so inflammed, angry for the sake of being angry. What is going on with people’s brains? It is an exceptionally unpleasant time to be alive right now with so much vile anger and hatred, so much lack of creativity…on and on and on. I know synapses are getting fused. Does everybody have a degree of brain damage from covid? Why are people not making proper diet changes for behavioral transformations? Everybody comes across as having serious neurodiverse issues and mental health issues. Strangest of times and many are just oblivious

Considering that the cost of these tests are only a fraction of the cost of antidepressants and psych consultations, I think these should be mandated before starting antidepressants to avoid beating around the bush and misdiagnoses.

In 1953, a 27-year-old man named Henry Gustav Molaison walked into a surgery room hoping for relief from his debilitating epilepsy. What he didn’t know was that he was about to become one of the most famous and important patients in neuroscience history.

Henry had been suffering from life-ruining seizures for years. Doctors decided to try something radical: remove parts of his brain causing the seizures. A surgeon named Dr. William Scoville removed both of Henry’s medial temporal lobes, including most of his hippocampi — structures deep in the brain crucial for memory.

The good news? His seizures improved.

The bad news? Henry could no longer form new memories. Like, at all.

From that day forward, Henry lived permanently in the present. He could remember his childhood. He could have a conversation — but forget it just moments later. He'd meet someone, and moments after shaking their hand, forget he ever had. You could leave the room and come back, and he’d greet you like a stranger every time.

But here’s where it gets wild.

Despite this, Henry could learn new motor skills. Researchers gave him tasks like tracing shapes in a mirror (which is harder than it sounds). He got better at it over time — even though he had no memory of ever doing it before.

This meant one of the most profound discoveries in neuroscience: not all memory is the same. The brain has separate systems for "explicit memory" (facts and events you consciously recall) and "procedural memory" (skills and habits you don’t even realize you’re storing).

Henry (who was anonymized as “H.M.” in research papers for decades) quite literally reshaped our understanding of memory, consciousness, and how the brain works.

He never became a scientist, but scientists around the world studied him for over 50 years. When he died in 2008, his brain was frozen, scanned in ultra-thin slices, and digitized for public research — making him possibly the most studied brain in human history.

All because he said yes to surgery in 1953.

No joke, the color projected from your screen is exactly the same for each face. Our brains refuse to believe it because they think the image on the left is in the shade and the image on the right is in bright light... so our perception auto-corrects the lighting in our mind.

The Image created by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a Japanese psychologist and professor at the College of Letters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan.

If you have any sort of image editor on your computer, you can check, and both faces have an RGB value of #7D7D7D.

It is so hard to force yourself to see the colors as being the same - which shows how much your brain can lie to you about what you perceive. (What else is it lying to you about?)

I’m a visual learner, and studying neuroanatomy I could never find a map detailed enough. They’d name the broad regions but skip the actual sulci, gyri, and subcomponents I needed. So I built one for future generations!

You can peel it apart from cortex down to individual gyri/sulci, deep nuclei, ventricles, brainstem, cerebellum, circle of Willis, cranial nerves.

Free and open source! I hope it will help more people here

https://itayinbarr.github.io/brainproject/

This was most likely a very slow build up (because a sudden onset would not go unnoticed) started by some kind of infection/bleeding, creating scar tissue where the 3rd and 4th ventricles should connect. The ventricles got a bit smaller after surgery.

From the article: "For someone just looking for a general understanding of what creativity or self-control are, or someone looking to improve those things, the neuroscience is just irrelevant. Naming a brain region that lights up when you do an activity doesn’t help you understand that thing or do it better."