Neurotransmitter fashion

A graph of scientific articles published per year which mention four major neurotransmitters in their title:

What I take from this is

• Dopamine is king! And with great popularity, comes great misrepresentation.


• What happened to glutamate research in the mid 1990s?


• The recent hype about oxytocin doesn’t seem to be driven by a spike in the primary literature.


• Nor does the hype about serotonin. Yes, publications increase on this neurotransmitter, but not compared to glutamate. And most people haven’t heard about glutamate, despite it being more abundant.

Technical note: I scraped the data from google scholar using scholar.py by Christian Kriebich

Update: here’s the raw data, should you want it

A neuroscientist podcaster explains&#8230

There’s a great ongoing podcast series called A Neuroscientist Explains that looks at some of the most important points of contact between neuroscience and the wider world.

It’s a project of The Guardian Science Weekly podcast and is hosted by brain scientist Daniel Glaser who has an interesting profile – having been a cognitive neuroscientist for many years before moving into the world of art and public engagement.

Glaser takes inspiration from culture and current affairs – which often throws up discussion about the mind or brain – and then looks at these ideas in depth, typically with one of the leading researchers in the field.

Recent episodes on empathy and music have been particularly good (although skip the first episode in the series – unusually, there’s a few clangers in it) and they manage to strike a great balance between outlining the fundamentals while debating the latest ideas and findings.

It seems you can’t link solely to the podcast but you can pick them on the page linked below.

 

Link to ‘A Neuroscientist Explains’