BRAIN AND BEHAVIOR

Studies in the field have sustained evidence that depression is not a way to become a myth or a legend. Animals get depressed too. Yet, people get depressed just because they have a brain. The crescent number of individuals who commit suicide every year or become emotionally handicapped because of the effects of depression has shown that depression is indeed a complex mental disorder that affects people of both sexes from everywhere.      Still, it is a debilitating disease characterized by a serious difficulty to process particularly negative emotions and feelings during people's lives. Stressful experiences turn out to be unbearable and a source of profound despair and desolation, but sometimes these feelings can also occur without any apparent reason. The pathology has a great heritage component that leads susceptible people to develop the disorder at any point in their lives, triggered by impacting events that some individuals can not cope with properly.  Importa...

 Without learning, we would be less than an empty jar. The learnings that we accumulate across life represent our content, which we need to survive and improve, enabling us to adapt and reproduce repetitive behaviors according to the situations we have to face or enjoy, like recognizations, reading, singing a song, etc.  There are different types of learning, and all they contribute to form experiences that become consolidated as memories. The first one is stimulus-response learning,  the most basic learning because it is always connected to a stimulus, leading us to behave in a specific way every time we are exposed to it.  Small children became conditioned to a sleep routine during the night when they took them to their rooms, turned off the light, and gave their blankets.  In the same way, adults become conditioned to the alarm clock to wake up. Both behaviors happen as the response to the different stimuli. In the operational condition, learning will flouris...

     For the general population, aggressiveness is a despicable characteristic of certain human beings. On the other hand, from a scientific perspective, aggression is nothing more than a natural behavior, which makes us all despicable subjects of study about the topic.  Our aggressiveness does not distinguish us. It is pervasive and abounds among many species. Human's tendency to kill and eliminate other human beings reflects a kind of aggression perpetuated through evolutionary processes that came from some ancestral that at one point was worse than us.  However, laws and rules (sometimes) prevent people from indiscriminately killing like a hippopotamus do every time they feel threatened by a competitor swimming in his private territory.  As time went by, we became more able to control our instincts and direct our aggressiveness to different targets and use it in more beneficial ways.  Yet, we also learned how to conceal such detrimental emotions. We...

 The circadian cycle is our inner biological clock.  It governs how we work every day as a calibrated machine. Activities as a wake-up, feel hungry, secrete hormones, and also the time that we usually go to sleep are regulated by this intern mechanism that keeps us working at the same pace as long as possible for our own sake. In summary, it rules our individual internal and external routines.  Without this neurological regulation, we would be lost during the hours of the day and start to display irregular behaviors that will have no time to happen because we would be totally maladapted to function in a day of 24 hs as we know.  People's circadian cycle was affected over time. Their life activities were influenced by the light of the sun. Our ancestors had more time to sleep. There was no way for someone to become a workaholic; therefore, they were not so busy during the whole day, and they could sleep more, rest, take a nap and feel better at the end of the day for ...

There are just two types of photoreceptors in the human eyes. These light-sensitive cells are the rods and cones, which are located in the retina. The cones, more precisely set in the Fovea, the central part of the eye responsible for visual acuity. Then, there is the peripheral area where the rodes are placed in a higher concentration than cones.  The differences in the way that the photoreceptors are distributed reflect in how people experience the sense of vision, according to the characteristics of the environment.  The cones give us the capacity to focus on tiny things and see details. But when we have to focus on things that are far from us, and in special situations that light is not favorable, these images that we see will be processed by the peripheral area where rods are located.   Threfore, depending on the circumstances and on what has been focused, you can rely more on cones or rods.  Generally, when trying to see faint stars or distant lights when ...