By Elisabeth Reichel and Ornella Valenti We are not born with self-regulation skills. Instead, these skills are called neuro-developmental, which means that when we are born, we have an innate capacity to learn them (nature) but we need the right environment to develop them (nurture). ​ Our future relationships have their blueprint in nerve cell connections that…

By Ornella Valenti I have always been fascinated by language and communication. Studies suggest that languages are somehow associated with our deeper selves, with our genetic background. Although this is still a topic of intense research, the ability to speak and to communicate are definitely gifts of our species and favour our daily lives, as…

By Valquiria Gonҫalves de Oliveira and Ornella Valenti The pandemic took us by surprise and turned our lives upside down, bringing with it a huge emotional burden, trauma and uncertainty for the future. And yet, never before has the word resilience, the ability to cope with negative emotions and to look to the future with…

By Ornella Valenti It’s that time of the year again! I don’t know about you, but I am always filled with deep curiosity ahead of the Nobel Prize announcements. This curiosity almost turns into excitement for my favorite one: the prize for Physiology and Medicine. And this year was no different! The ‘winners’ for the…

By Ornella Valenti Neurotransmitters are brain chemicals that allow cells to communicate and to interconnect. They function like small boats that transfer important messages from one brain cell, the neuron, to the others. In Figure 1, orange spheres are representative of neurotransmitters, released from one neuron and directed to neighbouring ones. Over the past years, several…

By Ornella Valenti How wonderful and rich in diversity is Nature! We will never get tired of admiring it and being amazed by it. As showcased in our blog, Nature is permeated with phenomena that, using anthropological language, we could define as being of cooperation, mutualism, solidarity, and even selfless altruism. That’s right! Even altruism…

By Ornella Valenti The cerebral cortex of mammals is the most recent, developed and specialized of the brain regions. Thousands of brain cells, the neurons, support its operation. Cortical neurons can be essentially grouped into two big classes, namely pyramidal cells and GABAergic interneurons. However, while only three types of pyramidal neurons have been characterized, interneurons…

By Ornella Valenti It was the early 90s and prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues (Parma, Italy) were studying how tiny cells in our brain, the neurons, orchestrate the activity of the muscles. Neurons send electrical signals to other cells within the brain or to the muscles at the periphery. These signals can be thought…

By Ornella Valenti One of the final frontiers of human knowledge, the most fascinating from my perspective, lies within us: it is our mind. Here, recent years have witnessed terrific progresses in the understanding of cognitive processing. We now know that thoughts, memories, decisions, all arise from the activity of tiny cells in our brain, the neurons,…