I forget the name of the app, but we used a potty tracker. Basically, once we realized our puppy went to the bathroom X hours after eating or drinking, we took him outside a few minutes before then.
I’ve also heard you can take those pee pads and gradually move them closer to the door until they’re outside.
I studied parts of the basal ganglia, part of the dopaminergic circuits of motor control. I’m not sure if it’s a poorly written (news) article or the scientist was overstating his position - I don’t know any neuroscientists who think dopamine is “sprayed” across the brain.
Edit: The paper is a breakthrough because it’s reporting the first-ever direct imaging of dopamine signaling. But the news article mischaracterizes it.
At three months, my son started smiling. That’s when it got way easier. The post partum spouse care can be so hard - especially when there are complications.
Do you have any family (parents, siblings, in laws) you can ask for help? We basically had live in help for the first two months, I don’t know if I could have done it without them.
If you’re working on a budget like I was when starting out on my own, I recommend your first purchase to be a bed frame. You can use Ceaigslist / FB marketplace to find some really cheap used options. From there, you can start buying (used) furniture that matches the bed frame. Personally, I needed a nightstand immediately after the bed frame because I wanted to put my glasses somewhere.
Standard? Not really. But there’s a tutorial here: https://github.com/miykael/3dprintyourbrain
Happy to answer some questions if you have issues
Interesting question. It depends. I linked Ev Fedorenko’s Interesting Brain Project at MIT up above, they’re doing a deep dive into questions like those.
Broadly speaking, if you’re born with these anatomical anomalies, you’ll be more or less normal. The article mentions the person in question had an IQ of 70, so that’s lower than normal, but not intellectually impaired.
But acquired Brain damage almost always leads to impediments. Strokes and repeated concussions, physical injury, etc.
The brain is “plastic” when you’re young, we like to say. That is, it’s pliable and can mold into whatever shape it needs to in order to adapt to your environment. That plasticity disappears once you get older. It’s how kids can learn language effortlessly - when you’re born, you have the most neurons and synapses you’ll ever have in your life. You’ll keep the same neurons (unless you have a degenerative disorder or kill them with drugs), make new synapses as you learn, but broadly speaking as you grow up you prune synapses that aren’t helpful.
This is also why kids can undergo massive resection surgeries (or in the olden days, severing of the corpus callosum) and grow up more or less normal.
In the US getting an MRI for “no reason” can be very expensive. Probably wouldn’t have been covered by insurance.
Ev Fedorenko has done some of the best research in brain science, in my opinion. There’s no better rabbit hole than her research!
Eh, college is hard and so was his sport. Sure, it’s not an exhaustive battery of testing but I’m confident to say he’s a normal dude.
That’s the short of it - but we passed all brain data to a university affiliated neurologist for review. We also allowed participants to take a copy of their brain data if they wanted. I’ve got a CD of my own brain kicking around somewhere, and I even helped a few people 3D print their brains.
But, anything that I said about the participants brain opened me up to liability. What if I said their brain looked OK and there was a tumor? Or vice versa? The University felt I could be sued, so we were trained to not speak about their brain.
Well it’s not quite water, it’s cerebrospinal fluid and it plays a lot of important roles in waste clearance, immune protection, protection from concussion, and more.
Nope, not related to any disease I’ve ever seen. The best guess i have is fetal alcohol syndrome but it isn’t a perfect match. It’s just weird knowing he has a very odd shaped brain. And there’s a lot of unknowns surrounding it.
What if he sees another doctor and they mention it to him? Would he be upset I didn’t say anything? What if it is linked to some disease and I didn’t tell him, and he gets sick?
What if it’s hereditary and his kid has it, does it explain the motor delays? The premature birth? The problems they have with him sleeping?
Just a lot of unknowns.
We’ve actually seen a handful of them in the community. MIT has an “Interesting Brain Project” https://news.mit.edu/2023/studies-of-unusual-brains-reveal-insights-brain-organization-function-0221.
If you’re born that way, odds are you’ll be more or less normal. It’s amazing to see how resilient the human brain is.
In fact, one woman in China was born without a cerebellum. She wasn’t exactly normal per se, but she was alive and more or less healthy. Even though the cerebellum is smaller by volume it has about the same number of neurons as the cerebrum. So she just had half a brain. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329861-900-woman-of-24-found-to-have-no-cerebellum-in-her-brain/
I ran a lot of MRIs for my PhD. I saw somewhere around 100-200 different brains. About 10% of them had abnormalities. Of all the technicians, scientists, and (non-clinical) doctors I spoke with, we all agreed this was a very high rate of discovery. All my friends graduated without seeing anything weird. My advisor liked to joke that I was cursed. Eventually I stopped inviting my friends to do my experiments because I didn’t want to deal with the risk of them having an abnormality - thanks to some combination of HIPAA and medical liability laws, I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it, even if asked point blank. I didn’t like that very much.
I made one exception, as a friend of mine came in for a study and I saw a golf ball sized cyst in his sinus. He had it surgically removed and he told me he stopped snoring the next day. It felt good to make a difference for him.
But, I saw one brain similar to the one documented here. It belongs to one of my close friends. It was harrowing. Entire left hemisphere was malformed, the ventricles were way too big and the cortex was way too thin. But the right side of his brain was underdeveloped, maybe the size of a tennis ball.
The weirdest part, he is 100% normal. In fact, he competed at a high level of college athletics. Normal Cognition, normal motor function, great sense of humor, and a very caring person. Now he has a great job, wife and kid, and we hang out often. But I can’t bring myself to say anything, and every time I see his son I wonder about his brain.
Well shit. That makes a lot of sense.
No no, they listen. How do you think the “Hey Google” feature works? It has to listen for the key phrase. Might as well just listen to everything else.
I spent some time with a friend and his mother and spoke in Spanish for about two hours while YouTube was playing music. I had Spanish ads for 2 weeks after that.
And that root cause? The BRAIN.
All jokes aside, this sort of research forms the backbone of modern medicine. It’s also at risk with the Trump administration targeting federal research grants from the NIH.
For those of us in the US, call and email your representatives, join protests, and get organized.
To be fair, people were treating mummies like cheesesteak for a very long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy?wprov=sfla1
This happened with an academic conference (physics iirc). A professor was asked to speak and she submitted a headshot for use in their advertising, but the conference wanted a different aspect ratio. Rather than crop the image, the materials designer asked ChatGPT to expand the photo to the correct size. It gave the professor a low cut shirt, and no one at the conference company noticed until the promotional materials were distributed and the professor contacted them.