Sunday Sciku | Seedy Places

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have discovered what amounts to a reflexive negativity bias in our sense of smell, showing that bad smells are processed rapidly and unconsciously. The olfactory bulb can process and send a signal to the motor cortex in 300 milliseconds, alerting us to rotten food before we swallow or …

Sunday SciKu | Pleasure Seeking

Honestly, I can’t quite wrap my head around this week’s sciku article. The role of dopamine in our external rewards system has been studied extensively, but we also have regular passive spikes of the neurotransmitter cycling trough our brains spontaneously—in mice it’s a spike every minute or so—and we don’t really understand why. In a …