The brain’s hippocampi may be the film editors of our lives, slicing our continuous experiences into discrete cuts that can be stored away as memories. That’s the idea raised by a new study that analyzed brain scan data from people watching films such as “Forrest Gump.” “Research like this helps us identify ‘What is an […]

The age-old adage “I’ll sleep on it” has proven to be scientifically sound advice, according to a new study which measured changes in people’s brain activity and responses before and after a nap. The findings, published in the Journal of Sleep Research, support the advice which suggests that a period of sleep may help weighing […]

Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing? Two researchers have dubbed this phenomenon scarcity, and they compare it to tunnel vision, blinding you to the big picture. When you’re hungry, it can be hard to think of anything […]

To gain new insight into how highly specialized workers learn skills or react to stressful situations, researchers are leveraging advanced scanning technologies to look at what’s happening inside the brain. In the latest findings, a team of researchers studied surgeons as they performed surgical simulations and found they could identify novice from experienced surgeons by […]

Here’s a sentence. Got it? You just involuntarily transformed symbols on a screen into sounds in your head. Or to put it another way, you read it. That seems simple enough, but moving from what letters look like to what they sound like is a complex multisensory task that requires cooperation among brain areas specialized […]

Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds. (October 2, 2018) Read the full […]

Ron Ferguson, an economist at Harvard, has made a career out of studying the achievement gap — the well-documented learning gap that exists between kids of different races and socioeconomic statuses. But even he was surprised to discover that gap visible with “stark differences” by just age 2, meaning “kids aren’t halfway to kindergarten and […]

New research now published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the brain circuits involved in free will and the decision to move. Neuroscience can dive into deep, philosophical problems, only to emerge with palpable proof that even the most ethereal questions have a very concrete answer in the machinery of our […]

I spend too much time in hotels. For the most part, the service is good and I don’t have many serious complaints, other than missing my family. But I have a pet peeve. Regardless of the hotel, every bathroom has the edges of the toilet paper folded into a little triangle. I don’t know about […]

The internet has made it easy for groups to collaborate from pretty much anywhere, but this experimental brain-to-brain “social network” could be the beginning of a whole new ballgame. The new system, dubbed BrainNet, was tested by wiring three test subjects up to machines that let them send messages to each other using just their […]