Brain/Neuroscience

Meet the cyborg who can help decode the human brain
His motion capture suit, sensor-embedded gloves, and virtual reality eyewear were already enough to turn heads. But what stopped people ...

Viewpoint: The choosiness myth — Why are there fewer women in science?
In 1879, French polymath Gustave Le Bon wrote that even in “the most intelligent races” there “are a large number of ...

Can you really exercise your brain?
Who wouldn’t want a better memory? After all, our recollections are fragile and can be impaired by diseases, injuries, mental ...

Race and ADHD: Clear evidence of genetically-based racial differences in proclivity and effective treatments
[T]here may be key genetic differences in the causes of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) between African Americans and people of ...

‘We have absolutely no idea what the adverse effects of that could be’: What’s the science skinny on ‘brain boosting’ supplements
Nootropics, also called smart drugs, have become one of the fastest-growing segments of the supplement industry. They’re marketed as products that can ...

COVID long haulers face crushing mental roller-coaster
Early on in the pandemic, a pervasive myth among patients and some health authorities was the idea that Covid-19 was ...

How mindfulness meditation can enhance mind control
[Researchers] conducted a large-scale human study enrolling subjects in a weekly 8-week course in simple, widely-practiced meditation techniques, to test ...

Circadian rhythms: Do men and women tolerate staying up overnight differently?
Recently, researchers have found evidence that biological differences between the sexes can affect the circadian rhythm of both humans and ...

God complex? Neuroscientists explore links between unconscious patterns and belief in a higher being
Individuals who can unconsciously predict complex patterns, an ability called implicit pattern learning, are likely to hold stronger beliefs that ...

Magic tricks can help us better understand animal intelligence
[A]s a new Science: Perspectives article points out, it’s not just humans who get fooled by magic tricks. Many species of animals ...

Why we lie and the challenge of being honest
We lie when we think we can get away with it. We lie more in groups, especially if we see other ...

Dream Bank: Analysis of 38,000 dreams yield fresh insights
In the largest digital dream study so far, researchers at Cambridge University’s Nokia Bell Labs in the U.K. recently created ...

How you can train your brain to reduce motion sickness
With the concept of autonomous vehicles coming closer to our roads, the need to reduce motion sickness is more apparent ...

Can listening to Mozart reduce epileptic seizures?
In a paper published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology and just presented at a virtual meeting of the European College of ...

Brain hunger: The hunt to understand loneliness
Kay Tye set out to answer a question that has taken on new resonance in the age of social distancing: ...

Here’s why children learn languages more easily than adults
Previous brain scanning research and the clinical findings of language loss in patients who suffered a left hemisphere stroke have ...

Best defense against Alzheimer’s: Deep, restorative sleep
[A] study, recently published by investigators at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, suggests that defense against Alzheimer’s disease is ...

‘It’s all in the brain’: The science behind stuttering
Gerald Maguire has stuttered since childhood, but you might not guess it from talking to him. For the past 25 ...

‘Detecting consciousness’: Living with a missing cerebellum and other mysteries of the brain
Can electrical impulses in the brain explain the stuff that dreams are made of? ...

Puberty resets the brain, giving preteens facing stress and hardship a second chance
A childhood characterized by hardship, negligence or abuse can also alter the neuroendocrine system that regulates how the body responds ...

How sleep ‘cleans’ the brain
Sleep has critical roles in health and regeneration, and one of those is clearing the brain of metabolic waste, according ...

COVID spurs fears of surge in suicides
The rate of suicide—the second leading cause of death in the U.S. among people ages 10 to 34 and the ...

Freud was right – dreams are a distorted continuation of reality
Whereas ancient civilisations may have interpreted dreams as having supernatural or spiritual origins, in modern society, we're more likely to ...

Can you change your personality as you age?
Personality is the pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors unique to a person. People tend to think of personality as fixed. But ...

How animals think
Neuroscientists wanting to understand the brain’s coding language have conventionally studied how its networks of cells respond to sensory information ...

Infographic: How social isolation forced by the coronavirus affects the brain?
[B]efore COVID-19 began its global spread, millions of people were already what researchers consider to be socially isolated—separated from society, ...

Podcast: Neuralink brain chips; Flu vaccines during COVID; US farm system unraveling?
Elon Musk's company Neuralink recently debuted its brain implant in pigs, pushing us a little closer to integrating humans and ...

When the brain adjusts what we see, is it distorting reality?
[From a few feet away, a manhole cover] looks circular, but this is because of some impressive perceptual machinery in ...