What about the love molecule?

Following up on chemical messengers used by the brain and their modulators, today I will talk about oxytocin, the “love molecule”. Oxytocin is a neuromodulator, that is, as I already written on my previous post about serotonin, a molecule able to modulate the transmission of information among neurons. However, oxytocin is also a hormone (basically,…

How do benzodiazepines work?

Another very interesting course that I attended during my first year of Neurobiology Master‘s was the one called “Neurochemistry and Neuropharmacology”. During this course, we finally started studying the different chemicals, called neurotransmitters, produced by neurons in the nervous system. As I have already written in an old post, neurons communicate through electricity and chemical…

And what about PhD and anxiety?

Luckily, during these past days, I have managed to recover a bit from the stressful weeks I experienced at work and from what I can now define depressive symptoms, and I would like to wrap up this topic of PhD and depression/anxiety by talking about anxiety during the PhD. So let’s start by the first…

Is there a link between PhD and depression?

Today I would like to take a break from both the story of how I ended up doing a PhD in Germany and the news from the scientific world, and I would like to talk to you about depression and its link with PhD studies. Even though it is a fact of lab life that…