neuroscience
GLP podcast and video: Mind-reading social media platforms; Developing countries reject Greenpeace’s ‘privileged’ green beliefs; New antibiotic coming soon?
Social media companies are experimenting with new technologies that measure human brain activity. Does this drive to fine tune the ...
‘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? ...
To this man, numbers look like scrambled “spaghetti” but his brain works fine. What’s going on?
RFS is the first patient with an inability to see numbers. "He sees something … a scramble of lines and ...
‘Mind blindness’ makes it hard to remember the past and picture the future
[R]ecent studies have found that 2% to 5% of people will see nothing at all [when they try to imagine ...
Why do some scents trigger powerful memories?
Anecdotally, many of us have had experiences where a certain smell—perhaps chlorine, fresh baked cookies, or the salty beach air—floods ...
Symphony of scents: Why do flowers smell different from rotting fish?
In the deep recesses of the nose are millions of sensory neurons that, along with our eyes and ears, help ...
Motivation complex: What explains that extra burst of energy as we near completing a goal or task?
Whatever it is you’re striving to achieve, science shows you’re likely to push harder the closer you feel to the ...
Unlocking the ‘deepest secrets of our brains as we grow and age’
Just as our human relationships and connections can nudge, push, or dramatically shift societal values and consequences, the connections between ...
Exercise may benefit your brain more than any other part of your body
The Norwegian Directorate of Health recommends that people exercise at moderate intensity a total of 2.5 hours each week – ...
Treasure hunting: Traveling to new locations allows the brain to seek ‘rewards’
We are free to wander but usually when we go somewhere it’s for a reason. In a new study, researchers ...
Brain’s ‘ready-to-encode’ mode helps us create memories
What happens in the hippocampus even before people attempt to form memories may impact whether they remember. A new study ...
‘The Idea of the Brain’: Pinpointing the storage location for our memories
For centuries, scientists have been arguing about where memory resides in the brain. I explore the fascinating history of this ...
The human brain may not be such a great model for designing artificial intelligence
[M]ost artificial neural networks are decidedly un-brainlike, in part because they learn using mathematical tricks that would be difficult, if ...
Drinking and smoking ‘of any level’ while pregnant may harm baby’s development, study says
If you're stressed or wanting to enjoy virtual happy hour with friends while pregnant, having a glass of wine every ...
How do dogs focus on key odors, while tuning out the rest?
“The question that we sought out to study here is, ‘how does [a] dog suppress this uninformative signal [such as] ...
Do rising carbon dioxide levels dampen our ability to think and make decisions?
As the 21st century progresses, rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations will cause urban and indoor levels of the gas ...
Alzheimer’s research is at a dead end. Here are 5 unexplored treatment routes
It is time to go back to basics. I have been a scientist involved in Alzheimer's research for three decades, ...
Is creativity driven by the right side of the brain? Not necessarily, according to this study of jazz guitarists
According to a popular view, creativity is a product of the brain's right hemisphere - innovative people are considered "right-brain ...
Biomarkers could be key to blood test for concussions
There is no single distinguishing feature of a concussion. Most of these symptoms can also be present in other types of injury ...
Explaining consciousness: These 2 brain networks show how we turn experiences into memories
One of the most recent studies showed a clear relationship between two brain networks critical to consciousness. In a paper ...
‘The genie is out of the bottle’: How ‘mind reading’ will transform medical care
The ability to detect electrical activity in the brain through the scalp, and to control it, will soon transform medicine ...
Are babies born with brains ready to understand the world?
Neuroscientists understand much about how the human brain is organized into systems specialized for recognizing faces or scenes or for ...
Does listening to music make difficult tasks easier? That may depend on your personality
The fact that music can make a difficult task more tolerable may be why students often choose to listen to ...
Our brains aren’t computers and why it hinders research to think of them that way
By viewing the brain as a computer that passively responds to inputs and processes data, we forget that it is ...
Structure of the brains of career criminals may shed light on ‘persistent antisocial behavior’
[A]dults with a long history of offenses show striking differences in brain structure compared with those who have stuck to ...
This is your brain on horror movies
When we watch horror movies, our brains are hard at work, with lots of interconnected cross-talk between different regions to ...
‘There’s so much going on.’ Why human brains may be too complex to be ‘understood’
The question of how we might begin to grasp the entirety of the organ that generates our minds has been ...
