I think Love is a wonderful thing that should be celebrated, and to that end I’d like to wish all the lovers out there a great day with their significant others.

Confusing Love and Happiness

I take issue today with the institution of Valentines Day, which masquerades as a supporter of love, happiness, and all things good about personal relationships, concealing an insidious second purpose just beneath the surface.  VDay, with the help of our Advertising and Media, manages to juxtapose happiness and love for the purposes of making the argument that a persons happiness and fulfillment have a dependent relationship to love or, errm, relationships.

Read more »

In response to a blog post I wrote recently, a friend kindly pointed out that I seemed to have overlooked the work of Dr. Eric Kandel and others with respect to molecular changes that occur in neurons during learning.  In 2000 Eric Kandel was awarded the Nobel Prize along with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard for their work detailing such molecular changes.  As it turns out because of their work, we actually have a pretty fantastic understanding about how things are committed to short and long-term memory, as well as the general way in which synaptic connections relate to the storage of things in memory.

Nobel Lecture 2000

My friend also provided a link to the lecture that Kandel gave while he was in Stockholm accepting the Nobel Prize.   I must admit that very little of the talk made complete sense to me, partly because the camera man chose not to show the screen while Kandel was using his laser pointer to go through the diagrams, and partly because I’m not a molecular biologist.   A few very cool insights did come out of watching the lecture, that are interesting enough to share…

Read more »