Word: physiologists
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Indeed, a lot of what researchers have learned about the biology of anxiety comes from scaring rats and then cutting them open. Just as the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed 100 years ago that you could condition a dog to salivate at the sound of a bell, scientists today have taught rats to fear all kinds of things--from buzzers to lights--by giving them electrical shocks when they hear the buzzer or see the light. The animals quickly learn to fear the stimulus even in the absence of a shock. Then researchers destroy small portions of the rats' brains...
...intriguing abnormality has also been found in the cerebellum of both autistic children and adults. An important class of cells known as Purkinje cells (after the Czech physiologist who discovered them) is far smaller in number. And this, believes neuroscientist Eric Courchesne, of the University of California at San Diego, offers a critical clue to what goes so badly awry in autism. The cerebellum, he notes, is one of the brain's busiest computational centers, and the Purkinje cells are critical elements in its data-integration system. Without these cells, the cerebellum is unable to do its job, which...
...muscles. Strong abdominals are good for you. They pull the pelvis up, which helps prevent pain by reducing the sway of the lower back. "Lower-back injury is one of the top problems in the country, and abdominal weakness is a huge contributing factor," says Miriam Nelson, an exercise physiologist at Tufts University in Boston. "We sit all day, and then if we go to the gym, most people focus on the biceps instead of the core muscles...
...wondered if that onset of divinity might have some relationship to the physiology of tickling. I'm serious - if that is the word. The (humorless) physiologist describes laughter as spasmodic, rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and, when due to tickling, involuntary: Those studying the neural pathways of what is called "the tickle-laughter reflex arc" postulate that tickling results from the simultaneous sensation of both touch and pain - a kind of benign assault, wherein Normality of touch (N) and a prospective Violence of pain (V) suddenly occupy the same space. N + V = H (hilarity...
...purpose of this research is not to take elite athletes to a new level," says physiologist Lee Sweeney, leader of the Pennsylvania team, "but to help them come back from injury faster." Nonetheless, similar techniques could theoretically be used for mitochondrial and cardiac redesign...