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Cake day: April 26th, 2026

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  • Szechuan peppercorns. They do not contain capsaicin, but produce a vanilloid drug that opens potassium leak channels in your mouth, preferentially in the fine touch afferents. When you eat szechuan spice these neurons misfire and tell your brain that you are sensing a rapid, fluttery (50Hz) vibration.

    Also called Chinese prickly ash, these trees are not related to chili peppers or black pepper, but are instead very small citrus fruit. Fears over them introducing citrus blight led to a ban on imports to the US that was only overturned in 2005. Since then, people like me have been discovering how good they are in pasta sauce.








  • Brain-imaging evidence showed that the subjects’ parietal lobes, involved in spatial reasoning, were more active during approximation problems; while the left inferior frontal lobes, involved in verbal reasoning, were more active during exact calculation problems. Studies of patients with brain lesions paint the same picture: those with parietal lesions sometimes can’t decide whether 9 is closer to 10 or to 5, but remember the multiplication table; whereas those with left-hemispheric lesions sometimes can’t decide whether 2+2 is 3 or 4, but know that the answer is closer to 3 than to 9.

    I wonder if, in the face of very large numbers, both these systems fail and we default to a social/emotional impression of “powerful/scary.”