My Perspective

To celebrate their 50 years, BNA has a huge number of reviews covering 'past, present, future' of many topics in neuroscience. Here is the link to a webpage with list of all published reviews. Link:  https://journals.sagepub.com/bna/past-present-future There are three reviews on psychiatric drugs and disorders. I list them below

Johnson & Johnson marketed 'Risperdal' (tradename for Risperidone) using a strategy that downplayed the drug's side-effects, and provided kickback payments to nursing homes, but more importantly encouraged off-label use in children for behavioural disorders/autism and in elderly for dementia/sleeping against the explicit instructions from FDA. Ultimately, the fines for this conduct cost J&J $2.2 billion but they made $18 billion in profits from this drug alone and it enabled the then Risperidal sales manager, Alex Gorsky, to become current CEO of J&J but escaping individual culpability for devising such a strategy! Please watch the above (edited) video that covers Dr. John Rengen Virapen, Ex Director of Eli Lilly, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. This comes after his retirement, after working for 35 Years in that company. He now speaks out on the many crimes Big Pharma was and is responsible for (and he himself also participated

Do you know what is the ancestral origin of modern day Indians? Is it Arya(ns) or Dravidians? Did prehistoric Indians emigrate in large-scale towards the West spreading culture and language? Or did they immigrate and bring their language and traditions to the subcontinent? Are you curious to know the latest scientific findings on these questions? A recent paper [1] published in Science journal used ancient DNA to address these questions. Key findings :

Graduate Record Examination (GRE) score is essential aspect of graduate application for admission into postgraduate and doctoral programs in United States, and Canada. However, a pertinent question arises as to whether the GRE score can predict ability of the applicant to succeed in their doctoral studies? I recently came across a systematic study [1] which tried to answer this question. The summary of their key findings are below

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?” - Robert Browning. Here are my learnings on how to succeed in life. I am summarizing the seven steps with key phrases that are just three words long as it makes it easy to remember and recall. I feel these seven steps are  lessons for life  and we should keep revisiting them often. This is my recipe for

"You don't really understand something well enough if you cannot explain it cogently to your grandmother!" - Unknown For a scientist or a researcher, the ability to summarize a work to a target audience effectively and succinctly is an important and useful skill. However there are different media (text, video, image) for conveying the research, each medium with different word limits (100 to 100 thousand words) and targeted towards a different audience (general public to experts).  Here are the different media for conveying research that I discuss in this article: Abstract - max. 100 words - general audience Precis - max. 300 words - scientists but not from the field 1 slide - eqv. 1000 words - scientists from the field 3 minute video - eqv. 3000 words -  general audience Poster - eqv. 10,000 words -  scientists but not from the field Paper - max 30,000 words -  scientists from the field Thesis - max. 100,000 words - general audience I discuss the skill o

Scientific studies have predicted that by the year 2026 the wild vertebrates (mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles) will go extinct. What would remain are those wild animals that are in the zoo. Could you guess the reason for this problem and a possible solution?  A recent peer reviewed publication [1] reported that the total biomass of

In my view, scientific progress primarily brings about betterment of society by improving the quality of life and providing access to modern healthcare. Though researchers strive to achieve breakthroughs hoping to translate these for public use, they implicitly assume that

My childhood dream has finally come true. I was recently awarded PhD in Auditory Neuroscience by Newcastle University, UK. My thesis is titled "A primate model of human cortical analysis of auditory objects".  Here is a short summary of my work:

I upgraded to LinkedIn Premium - Career plan - recently to try their exclusive features. I will list top features of premium membership and what it means to a regular user and whether it is useful. This article is written in the context of a professional looking to get hired and not in the point of view of a professional looking to recruit, increase sales or grow business. Here are my findings. Who viewed your profile  This feature allows one can see a lot of profile visitors for the past 90 days instead of just last 5 viewers that is provided regularly. However, it does not list people who

In this post, I will try to come up with examples from set theory as well as generic examples to help you understand necessity and sufficiency conditions better. Case 1 : A is both necessary and sufficient condition for B Set Theory example: Two identical sets A & B. If an element belongs to B it implies it belongs to A (so A is necessary for B) and if an element belongs to A it implies it belongs to B. (so A is sufficient for B) Generic Example:

In a recent paper [1], that studied 21 professionally qualified Sanskrit pandits, it was discovered that memorising Vedic mantras increases the size of brain regions associated with cognitive function, including short and long-term memory. The term the ‘Sanskrit Effect’ was thus coined. In short, this study showed that