Neuroscience

Brain Chemicals: The Neurotransmitters That Shape Your Reality You wake up feeling unmotivated. Coffee kicks in, and suddenly you’re ready to tackle your to-do list. An hour later, you’re riding a wave of focus. By afternoon, anxiety creeps in. Evening arrives, and you feel calm, content, even happy. What changed? Not your circumstances. Not your willpower. Your brain chemistry. Every thought, emotion, and behavior you experience is the result of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters communicating between billions of neurons. These molecules don’t just influence your mood-they determine how you perceive reality, make decisions, form memories, and experience pleasure or pain. ...

There’s a horror story that has circulated online for years, known as “The Russian Sleep Experiment” or “The Soviet Sleep Experiment.” The story goes like this: In the 1940s, Soviet researchers sealed five political prisoners in a chamber and used an experimental gas to keep them awake for 15 days straight. By day five, the subjects became paranoid and stopped talking to each other. By day nine, they were screaming. By day 15, they had mutilated themselves and were begging the researchers not to let them sleep. ...

Imagine waking up one morning absolutely convinced that you are dead. Not metaphorically dead. Not feeling empty or numb or depressed. Actually, literally, medically dead. You can see yourself breathing. You can feel your heart beating. You can touch your skin and feel warmth. But your brain insists, with total certainty, that you are a corpse. You try to explain this to your family: “I’m dead. I don’t exist anymore.” ...

A woman looks at her husband of 30 years. She recognizes his face. She knows it’s him. The features, the voice, the mannerisms-everything looks exactly right. But she knows he’s not her husband. She’s absolutely certain. This person is an imposter. An identical copy. A replacement. Her real husband has been taken, and this lookalike has been put in his place. She knows how it sounds. She knows it’s irrational. But the certainty is overwhelming. ...

In March 2013, a woman in the village of Kalachi, Kazakhstan walked into her kitchen to make breakfast. She felt suddenly drowsy. Overwhelming exhaustion washed over her. She lay down on the couch “just for a moment.” She didn’t wake up for six days. When she finally regained consciousness, she had no memory of what happened during those six days. No dreams. No sense of time passing. Just… nothing. She wasn’t the first. She wouldn’t be the last. ...

A woman hears the word “Derek” and immediately tastes earwax. Another person sees the number 5 as inherently, unavoidably red. Not because of any association or memory-it’s just red, the way the sky is blue. A musician feels violin notes as textures on his skin-high notes feel smooth and cool, low notes feel rough and warm. A painter sees every letter and number in specific colors. A is red, B is blue, C is yellow. She’s never seen them any other way. ...

You look down at your hands. They’re gigantic-swollen to three times their normal size, fingers like sausages, impossibly huge. You look at the room around you. It’s shrinking. The walls are closing in. The ceiling is descending. Everything is becoming tiny while you expand to fill the space. Or wait-are you shrinking? The room is growing massive. The doorway has become a cathedral entrance. Your hands are doll-sized. You are small, impossibly small, while the world balloons around you. ...

On September 13, 1848, a three-foot-seven-inch iron rod weighing thirteen pounds shot through Phineas Gage’s skull at the speed of a cannonball. It entered below his left cheekbone, passed behind his left eye, tore through the front part of his brain, and exploded out through the top of his head, landing about 80 feet away, covered in blood and brain matter. Gage was packing explosives into a rock using a tamping iron when a spark ignited the powder charge prematurely. The rod became a projectile, and Gage became the most famous patient in the history of neuroscience. ...

A neurologist is examining a patient who suffered frontal lobe damage from a stroke. The doctor sets a pair of glasses on the table between them during the examination. The patient reaches out, picks up the glasses, and puts them on-over the pair of glasses he’s already wearing. The doctor, curious, places another pair of glasses on the table. The patient picks them up and puts them on. Now he’s wearing three pairs of glasses, stacked on top of each other. ...

“It takes 21 days to form a habit.” I’ve heard this approximately one million times. Self-help books. Productivity blogs. Motivational Instagram posts. Life coaches. So I tried it. Day 1-7: Woke up at 6 AM to code before work. Felt great! I’m building a habit! Day 8-14: Woke up at 6 AM most days. Missed a few. Still committed! Day 15-21: Made it to Day 21! The habit is formed, right? ...