Why Booze Makes You Mean
Dramatic mood shifts while drinking alcohol are normal, but for some of us, booze takes us down a path toward nasty,…
Artificial Intelligence Detects Suicidal Tendencies in People Using Brain Scans
Recent scientific progress has allowed us to begin decoding the significance of many different patterns of activity in…
That Viral Story of an 'Awakened' Vegetative Patient Serves as a Cautionary Tale
Medicine is perfect for heartwarming stories. Some close relative is facing the most hopeless prognosis, such as being…
Scientists Have Been Using a Flawed Method to Diagnose Pain
For many years, neuroscientists believed they had identified a specific pattern of brain activity acting as a kind of…
This Documentary Uses Science to See Who Loves the Hardest
Six adults (and one kid), one fMRI machine, five minutes to love someone (or something) as hard as possible. In The…
Why We Need a Right to Privacy for Brain Data
There's still no technology in the world that lets you listen in on someone's thoughts. But fMRI advances are making it…
xkcd Explains Why Brain Scans Can Be Misleading
So much of neuroscience is now based entirely on fMRI studies. But as Randall Munroe's latest webcomic points out,…
How Many Tasks Can Our Brains Process At The Same Time?
The human brain has been described as a massively parallel computing machine. But just how powerful is it? A recent…
Scientists Used a Hitchcock Thriller to Measure Patients' Consciousness
Alfred Hitchcock, our master of suspense, was incredibly good at manipulating his audience—a fact that has now come in…
Scientists Can Reconstruct Faces by Reading Your Mind
Fantasizing about an old flame? Lusting over a celebrity instead of your current squeeze? Watch out: scientists can reco…
Brain Scans Reveal When Your Decisions Are Getting Risky
For the first time, scientists have shown that they can predict when people will make risky decisions based on brain…
Comment of the Day: Science of Fear Edition
In today's comments we speculated on which of our favorite on-screen characters were just one step away from a pink…
Why do we feel the pain of bad guys more than the good guys?
Whether it be in movies or real life, we don’t tend to feel sorry for the villains. But strangely, and even a bit…
Scientists say they've found the neural origin of humans' "sixth sense"
Answer as fast as you can: how many cats are in the image up top? Did you answer without counting them individually?…
New brain scan predicts criminal activity before it happens
Neuroscientists have identified a brain scan that enables them to predict whether convicted felons are likely to land…
Brain Scans Can Now Reveal Who You're Thinking About
For the first time, scientists have been able to use data from brain scans to identify who patients are thinking about.
Here's the Exact Part of Your Brain That Thinks About Sex (And Cars, And Baseball…)
If you've ever wondered which part of your brain thinks about a particular object, activity or concept, worry no…
This is a tree. It's also a brain.
Feast your eyes on a Maple Brain — a cerebellar sculpture (adapted from and inspired by actual fMRI scans) hewn from…
What is the most cringe-inducing sound of them all?
Everyone has noises that make them squirm and bury their ears beneath their hands. But which sound is the absolute…