Neuroscience

Why You Hear Things When Someone Grabs Your Mouth

At Yale University there is a robot that can make you hear what it wants you to hear. It does so by grabbing the corners of your mouth with string. But it’s not the threat of pain that messes up your ears. It’s the “head-had” effect. A lot of factors influence what we hear. Only…

Can “Facial Coding” Really Predict A Pro Athlete’s Performance?

The new owners of the Milwaukee Bucks have deep pockets and big ambitions — a combination that’s led them to one-up the Moneyball teambuilding strategy and hire “a facial coding expert who reads the faces of college prospects and NBA players to determine if they have the right emotional attributes to help the Bucks.” Reports…

Fly Swarms Reveal Something Profound About the Human Brain

We think of our brains as single, unified organs. But a new set of experiments with flies reveals that certain brain cells in these insects respond exclusively to crowd behavior. And that leads to an interesting question: Did cells in the animal brain evolve to think using something akin to the wisdom of fly swarms?…

The Bizarre Case of the Woman Who Saw Dragons Everywhere

Recently, a group of neuroscientists examined a woman who complained of an unusual ailment. The people around her kept turning into dragons. The fifty-something woman said the problem had been plaguing her for most of her life, and eventually prevented her from holding a job. When people turned into dragons, she reported, their faces turned…

Alzheimer’s Patients May Someday Be Able to Regain Lost Memories

A new study indicates that patients in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s might be able to regain memories previously thought to be permanently destroyed. Find out where “memory” is stored, and how it might come back if it’s lost. When an event happens, the brain pumps out a group of proteins. Those proteins create new…

How The Military Could Turn Your Mind Into The Next Battlefield

Long a staple of science fiction, the idea of creating weapons that can disrupt or alter the cognitive processes of enemy combatants is starting to become reality. Inspired by recent advances in neuroscience, the U.S. military is considering the potential for “neuro-cognitive weapons”. Here’s what you need to know about this fascinating and frightening prospect.…

Inside The Minds And Lives Of Real-Time Translators

The world’s most powerful computers can’t perform accurate real-time translation. Yet interpreters do it with ease. Meet the neuroscientists who are starting to explain this remarkable ability Photo Credit: Ffion Atkinson via flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 One morning this summer I paid a visit to the sole United Nations agency in London. The headquarters…

Your Dog May Understand More Than You Realize

Sometimes it may seem like your dog doesn’t want to listen, but a new study finds dog brains process human speech a lot like ours do. Your pooch may understand more than he lets on. Photo Credit: Mika Hiltunen via flickr | CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Human speech is complex, communicating not only words but also…

These are probably the most detailed images of nerves that have ever been produced. Italian researchers have developed a new technique for labelling nerves in living mice, which includes an artificial tagging system. The increased resolution is allowing scientists to see things they couldn’t before, including nerves arranged around skin hair.

The Taste Of Coffee Can Be Influenced By The Color Of Your Cup

If your morning brew tastes more bitter than usual, you may want to consider changing the color of your mug instead of adding more sugar. In a paper recently published in the journal Flavour, Australian scientists sought to learn if our perception of coffee could be influenced by the color of the cup from which…

​This Medical Condition Turns Your Life Into An Out-of-Sync Video

Ever had trouble getting the audio synced up with the video on your computer? Get the right kink in your brain, and you could live your whole life that way. One man began a new phase in his life when he looked at his daughter’s television and noticed that the audio and the video were…

What Is It Like To Follow your Heart, When You Have Two Of Them?

A growing body of evidence suggests that the emotions we experience, while seated in the brain, are heavily influenced by cardiac awareness (literally the attention you pay to the activity of your heart). Now, researchers have turned to a man with two hearts, to study this enigmatic brain/body relationship. Over at BBC Future, David Robson…

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, brain scans are not without their limitations. Indeed, as important and illuminating as fMRI studies are, they often don’t tell the whole story. More on this here, here, and here.

Watch In Horror As A Tapeworm Wiggles Through A Living Man’s Brain

Physicians in the UK were unable to explain a strange ring-like pattern moving across a patient’s brain tissue in a series of scans taken over four years. During a biopsy, they were shocked to learn it was a one centimeter-long parasitic tape worm. The 50-year-old Chinese man was admitted to hospital after complaining of headaches,…

How Did Brains Evolve?

Humans have asked where we come from for thousands of years, across all cultures. But only recently have we started to address the mystery of the evolution of the human brain — the organ that’s the source of those existential questions, not to mention our evolutionary success itself. Top image: Hubis/Shutterstock.com Our brains are each…

Inside the Weird Brains of Real-Time Translators

The world’s most powerful computers can’t perform accurate real-time translation. Yet interpreters do it with ease. Geoff Watts meets the neuroscientists who are starting to explain this remarkable ability. One morning this summer I paid a visit to the sole United Nations agency in London. The headquarters of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) sit on…

This Is What Cocaine Addiction Looks Like In a Transparent Mouse Brain

Last year, neuroscientists unveiled a remarkable new technique called CLARITY that makes whole mouse brains invisible. And now, they’re proving it’s not just a cool trick. A striking new video shows the complex circuits that light up when mice experience fear or cocaine addiction. Nature reports on a study led by Stanford neuroscientist Li Ye…

Neuroscientists “Rediscover” A Completely New Brain Part

A major brain pathway first described in an 1881 neuroanatomy atlas — and then completely forgotten — has been rediscovered and confirmed by scientists using modern scanning techniques. Above: A drawing by German-Austrian neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert that appeared in an 1892 article depicts other prominent brain pathways but leaves out the vertical occipital fasciculus. Caption…

How Does This Mind-Bending Illusion Work?

No, there are no magnets in there. The ball is rolling just the way you see it. This illusion is the work of mathematics professor, Kokichi Sugihara, from Meiji University and, if you’re wondering how he did it, the video below where he swaps the perspective of the illusion briefly to show you the other…

Money Makes You Less Rational Than You Think

Many of us believe that money brings out our calculating sides, inspiring decisions that are motivated by rational self-interest. But new evidence suggests that money does the opposite, leading to druglike mental states and irrational choices that are anything but sound. Illustration by Tara Jacoby. We get super weird around money, no doubt about it.…