Talks from the Bio lab desk

  The Desire to Unplug Across industrial societies, a quiet migration is underway. People speak of “disconnecting,” and leaving screens behind, escaping algorithmic feeds and returning to nature where they are surrounded by forests, mountains and rivers. The digital world feels overwhelming, while nature feels restorative. Beneath this cultural impulse lies a deeper biological question, that could be circling this “unplugging” hype, where we ask, whether, humans are actually adapted to forest life or are we only adapted to technological environments? To approach this, we must step away from romantic imagery and examine how organisms truly relate to their environments. In particular, we must examine how they sense them, because adaptation begins with perception, just as our senses are all in flux, from the digital input, let us look at it all. Nature as Sensor: Embodied Environmental Intelligence Crocodiles and Mechanoreception The Crocodile possesses specialized integumen...

  There’s a particular sound that cities make just before you fully wake up to them. It’s not one noise, but layers of it. A bus braking. Someone dragging a bin to the curb. A notification buzzing on your nightstand. Footsteps above you. Light leaking around the curtains before your alarm goes off. Now imagine a different morning. No engines. No alerts. Just air moving. Maybe birds. Maybe insects. Maybe nothing at all, the kind of quiet that feels so complete you notice your own breathing. Many of us move between these worlds, or at least fantasize about doing so. We scroll past “cabin in the woods” aesthetics, after a long day online. We talk about digital detoxes. We joke about disappearing into nature. Beneath the memes and the mood boards, something deeper is happening. Our biology is negotiating. This isn’t a story about cities being bad and forests being pure. It’s not a call to abandon modern life. It’s a look at how one species. The human species that is, adap...

These events happen right after you accept the call/text from your group of friends that there is a party happening or the planned night out to the concert, which has finally materialized from the group chat. Now let us begin. Moment 1: Before the first drink. Everything is working as it should You’ve just arrived. Music’s loud, lights are low, and the night still feels full of possibility. You feel relaxed, alert, confident. Not drunk, but just good. Biologically, this is your brain at baseline. Your mood, focus, and confidence come from billions of nerve cells communicating with each other in a very organized way. Ever heard of dopamine and brain chemicals and how they give you mood and all? The nerve cells don’t touch, but instead, they pass these chemical messages across tiny gaps called synaptic clefts . An image of a synaptic cleft When one nerve wants to “talk,” it releases neurotransmitters, which are the chemical messengers like dopamine, serotonin, and others,...