PULSE Magazine | January 2020 Issue

Livescience, NPR, Human Neuroscience-CMH

WHAT IS... THE MOST COMPLEX OBJECT IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE? which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body's repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteris- tics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimate- ly delay aging at least long enough to double life spans. In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pres- sure or upbringing has been shown heavily influ- ence who we are and what we do. Nature vs. Nurture Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: A thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother's foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor re- search at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities stories that disobey conventional expectations. Emotions

The most complex object in the known universe is essentially ourselves, our own brains. It is an enigma in that it is “us,” and yet it may seem to be an utterly alien system.

Mysteries of the Mind

Encased within your skull is an organ capable of feats of computation, creativity and understand- ing unrivalled in the known universe – and all us- ing the power of a 20-watt light bulb and weighs around 3 pounds. Much of what we don't under- stand about being human is simply in our heads. The brain is a perplexed organ, as are the very questions of life and death, consciousness, sleep, and much more. Consciousness is a body-wide process and not limited to individual cortical sites which suggest that it is actually an interactive process between the brain and body. When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions Consciousness

Mystery of Aging

Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury,

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