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What does it mean to be thirsty?
The effects of insufficient water are felt by every cell in the body, but it’s the brain that manifests our experience of thirst.
Because these brain areas are difficult to study — due not only to their location, but also to their composition, with many different cell types and crisscrossed circuitry — it’s only in the last decade or so that neuroscientists have begun to understand how thirst fundamentally works. Animals need sodium for neurons to fire action potentials, for proteins to keep their shape and function, and for chemical reactions to occur inside cells — the everyday business of life. Gracheva, a neurophysiologist at the Yale School of Medicine, studies these rodents, native to North American grasslands, to understand how specific brain regions control thirst.
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