The Lab With Brad

Can plants remember?

It was a throw away question from Phil, something he said in the middle of an episode as a joke. Obviously plants have no memory—how could they when they have no central nervous system, no brain with which to learn. However, a bit of digging and the answer turns out to be a bit stranger than expected. Join us as we talk about plant communication and memory.

Here are a couple of articles about plant communication.

How Plants Secretly Talk to Each Other

Plant communication

Here’s a tedtalk about how trees communicate through their roots.

Suzanne Simard: How trees talk to each other

Here’s a video of the Venus flytrap.

VENUS FLYTRAP JAWS OF DOOM!!

Here’s a video of the tickle me plant, AKA. mimosa pudica.

Mimosa Pudica - The Sensitive Plant

Here’s an article about how the Venus flytrap remembers and reacts to how often it’s sensory hairs have been touched.

Venus Flytraps Are Even Creepier Than We Thought

Here’s a quick press release about learning in the tickle me plant.

Move over elephants – plants have memories too

And here’s an article about the study of memory in the plant kingdom.

Learning in Plants: Lessons from Mimosa pudica

A few final bits of brain business

We’ve been talking about the brain for over nine months now. It’s time to play with some other subjects. Join us as we wrap up our look at the various bits and pieces of the brain, and consider what we’ll dive into next. We reserve the right to return to the brain and/or the mind at any time, for any reason, or no reason at all.

Here’s an article about a monkey that controlled a robot arm with her brain.

Monkey Think, Robot Do

Here’s a ted talk about the robots and monkies and the like.

Miguel Nicolelis: A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts. No, really.

Here’s one of several devices used to read your brain and use it to interface with computers, with no need to have anything implanted.

Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves

Here’s an article about the cyborg Olympics.

How We Won Gold in the Cyborg Olympics’ Brain Race

Will you remember this episode?

Your hippocampus, brain cells, molecules mind and memory. From your entire brain and all your senses, to specific areas of your brain, to braincells, to synapses, to a little dance of molecules to form the memory, and even your DNA to help make the memories last, remembering isn’t simple.

Here’s a quick video on the hippocampus.

2-Minute Neuroscience: The Hippocampus

Here’s a video about a patient who had the hippocampus removed, and what the resulting effects on his memory were.

What happens when you remove the hippocampus?

Here’s an article with more detail about the hippocampus.

Limbic System: Hippocampus

And my favorite link this week, here’s a very good article about how our memory works.

Learning and Memory

How your brain feels

We’re not talking about your brain’s squishy texture; we’re talking about emotion. Join us as we investigate the link between what your brain is doing and how you’re feeling.

Here’s a two-minute video on your limbic system.

2-Minute Neuroscience: Limbic System

Here’s an article with a historical view of the limbic system, up to and including the modern question of whether or not there really is such a thing.

From Paul Broca’s great limbic lobe to the limbic system

And here’s an article about the different areas of your brain involved with pleasure, desire and motivation.

Pleasure systems in the brain

The front of the front of the front of your brain

Located at the very front of your brain, your prefrontal cortex is vital for things like your memory, morality, sense of time, and personality. Phil and I talk about, but do not understand, your prefrontal cortex.

Here’s a link with some general info about the prefrontal cortex.

Neuropsychology of prefrontal cortex

Here’s a link to an earlier ep that talked, amongst other things, about Phineas Gage—a man who had an iron bar driven through his brain and lived to talk about it.

Pulsating, broken brains!

Here are several links about brain activity during musical improvisation.

This is Your Brain on Jazz

Rappers' Brains: Relaxed 'Executive Function' May Enable Freestyle Raps

Musical Creativity and the Brain

Here’s a link to an article about brain areas associated with courage.

Your Brain on Courage

And here’s a link to the same area being linked to clinical depression.

The Subgenual Anterior Cingulate Cortex in Mood Disorders

Third eyes, pineal glands, and your thalamus

Phil and I get back to the brain and brain bits, by talking about bits of your brain. Today is the diencephalon, with extra attention paid to your thalamus, a part of your brain that passes information around to just about every other part of your brain.

Here are a couple of articles about your pineal gland, AKA. Your third eye.

pineal gland | Definition, Location, Function, & Disorders

What our ancestors' third eye reveals about the evolution of mammals to warm blood

Here’s a pleasantly short video about your thalamus.

2-Minute Neuroscience: The Thalamus

Here’s a popular article about how the thalamus turns out to be doing more than just passing information from one place to another.

New Role Discovered For Brain Region

Here’s a more technical article about how the thalamus turns out to do more than just pass information from one place to another.

Thalamic amplification of cortical connectivity sustains attentional control

Our two year anniversary show!

Our show has made it to the two year point. So, we did an episode that doesn’t really have a point. We drift passed history, blackholes, astrology, Chinese emperors, waterclocks, and eventually land on an explanation of time dilation. From Einstein’s theory of special relativity, find out why the faster you go, the more time will slow.

Here’s a link about water clocks and their design.

Ancient Mechanical Clocks

Here’s a link to a timeline about keeping time. How we went from sundials to atomic clocks.

A Brief Introduction To The History Of Timekeeping Devices

Here’s a video that explains time dilation, and the bit I never did get right, length contraction.

Uncanny Relativity: Basics With A Light Clock

Here’s a site that, unlike our show, gets all the math right, with all the right formulas.

C-ship: The Dilation of Time

And finally, just in case you’re not sure you believe in all this relativity nonsense, here’s a video about how researchers working with particle accelerators deal with such things every day.

Einstein's Clocks

part 2: Black hole business

It’s the second part of the two part episode on black holes, where not even our point can escape.

Here’s an article on how we learned what the speed of light is.

Who determined the speed of light?

Here’s a tedtalk that talks about gravitational waves.

What the discovery of gravitational waves means

Here’s the sound of two blackholes colliding.

The Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

Here’s an article on the search for blackholes that we’ve been up to ever since we thought that there might be such a thing.

Who really discovered black holes?

Here’s an article about attempting to get an image of the blackhole at the center of our own galaxy.

How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?

And finally, here’s an article about the picture we got of a blackhole in the center of someone else’s galaxy.

Darkness Visible, Finally

part1: Blackhole background

We decided to do an episode on blackholes. It was by Phil’s request. it is the fiftieth episode wherein I have been joined by my brother as my co-host. Turned out to go a bit long, so here’s the first part, which turns out to be a bit short. It’s the story of how we figured out there were blackholes long before we ever saw one.

We didn’t get to the bit that explains what some of these links are about, but have them anyway. We’ll stick them on next week’s episode too, ep 222 part 2.

Here’s an article on how we learned what the speed of light is.

Who determined the speed of light?

Here’s a tedtalk that talks about gravitational waves.

What the discovery of gravitational waves means

Here’s the sound of two blackholes colliding.

The Sound of Two Black Holes Colliding

Here’s an article on the search for blackholes that we’ve been up to ever since we thought that there might be such a thing.

Who really discovered black holes?

Here’s an article about attempting to get an image of the blackhole at the center of our own galaxy.

How Do You Take a Picture of a Black Hole?

And finally, here’s an article about the picture we got of a blackhole in the center of someone else’s galaxy.

Darkness Visible, Finally

Your brain smells

From finding good food, to recognizing familiar people and places, to choosing a good person to make babies with, today we talk about your surprisingly useful sense of smell.

Here’s an article about how your nose can regrow the nerves you need in order to smell things.

When Smell Cells Fail they Call in Stem Cell Reserves

Here’s a bit about the sense of smell from someone who studies the sense of smell.

on the sense of smell and why you should never drink wine with a straw

Here’s an article about studying the sense of smell in insects, and how that helps us understand it in humans.

How the Brain Smells

Here are a few articles on how smell gets into your brain, and where it goes once it gets there.

How smell works

With Which Part of The Brain Do We smell?

Taste and Smell

And just for fun, here’s an article on how cats cannot taste sweetness.

Strange but True: Cats Cannot Taste Sweets