Blog | Neuromythology

A Deal with the Devil

A Deal with the Devil

Consistent with the overall theme of Neuromythology, I am including an interpretation of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The myth can be found in just about any standard account of classical mythology, though my favorite is the 2004 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Charles Martin. This segment is from the draft of a novella called The Gift by yours truly. The protagonist is a flawed classics professor, Dr. Dante Gerry, now teaching at a small liberal arts college in

You Make Me Sick

You Make Me Sick

We’ve all expressed strong feelings about something or someone with expressions like “you smell,” “you make me sick,” or “you make me want to puke.” We may stick out our tongues at someone. One of the strongest expressions of contempt is to spit in someone’s face. What is interesting s how such emotion, and such judgments, especially ones that really have little to do with gustatory experience, with smelling and tasting, are tied to these proximal senses. These are the senses

Forbidden Knowledge

Forbidden Knowledge

Parental Advisory: Explicit Content One of the truths about our neurophysiology is habituation, feeling less and less with repetition of the same stimulation over time. But our habituation can be overcome by our capacity for attention. Attention can be drawn by survival relevant events and powerful emotion, but also by our cortical capacities. We can pay attention to things because of conscious goals, things we are actually aware (or have convinced ourselves) that we are tryi

Intimacy and Habituation: We Need to Talk

Intimacy and Habituation: We Need to Talk

One of the problems with exploring the neuroscience behind any kind of human experience is the fear that doing so is reductive, and turns the experience into “nothing but” the underlying biology. As I have tried to make clear, and it is a lesson worth many repetitions, that just because the biology is necessary for an experience doesn’t make it sufficient. That does not mean that functions can “float free” of the biology necessary to accomplish them, any more than the bounce