Neuroscience

This Injury Could Blind You While Making You Believe You Can See

There is a specific mental condition that blocks the ability to recognize illness in oneself. It works whether the illness is schizophrenia, paralysis, or even complete blindness. It’s called anosognosia. Apparently one of the major problems dealing with people just after they’ve had a stroke is convincing them that they’ve had a stroke – or…

On today’s Science Times Podcast, Mike Mason talks with NYT science writer James Gorman about the fascinating work of computational neuroscientist Larry Abbott. A former particle physicist, Abbott became a neuroscientist when he “realized that the complex mathematics of physics came in quite handy for trying to understand the brain.”

A Mathematical Model Explains Why All Hipsters Look The Same

When enough contrarians actively resist mainstream trends, their nonconformity may actually align. Ergo beardsplosion. Neuroscientist Jonathan Touboul calls it “the hipster loop” or “the hipster effect.” His research involves neurons that, Touboul says, behave like hipsters, in that “they fire when every neuron around them is quiet; or they fall silent when every neuron around…

Why You Sometimes See Motion When Nothing’s Moving At All

When you’ve been driving down a long, straight road, and you suddenly come to a stop, does the road seem to rush away from you? When you look at a waterfall, then glance away, does it seem as though the scenery is flowing upwards? It’s called motion aftereffect, and it’s a kind of visual adaptation.…

Here’s What Your Brain Is Doing When You Really, Really Hate Someone

Scientists have spotted the parts of the brain that light up when we actively hate someone. There’s probably a reason why hate evolved in the first place — and it’s similar to love. The Hate Study In 2008, two scientists decided to launch a study to investigate whether the emotion of hatred was rooted in…

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 brain scan analysis is offering some unexpected results. Image: DiffusionMRI glyphs (a process similar to fMRI). Each of the brain’s voxel values is represented by an ellipsoid. (CC) Neuroscientist Harris Georgiou from the National Kapodistrian…

Test Subjects Made To See Ghosts In “Disturbing” Lab Experiment

In an experiment that could explain why some people see ghosts, participants were made to feel as though they saw phantoms around them and that ghosts were touching their backs with invisible fingers. The illusion was so real that some test subjects begged for it to stop. Scientists from Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne…

This Gamer Used His Thoughts To Control The Movements Of Another Player

An upgraded brain-to-brain interface has allowed researchers to transmit signals from one person’s brain over the internet and use those signals to control the hand motions of another person. Remarkably, the system allowed the participants to collaborate on a computer game. Photo: Mary Levin, U of Wash. This latest experiment by University of Washington researchers…

That Time When Scientists Zapped Braille Directly Into People’s Brains

During the 1970s, while bell-bottoms roamed the earth and The Dark Side of the Moon played on records, scientists were communicating images directly to the brains of blind people. What’s more, they were intelligible images. Recently therehave been astonishing advances in neurotechnology. They are accomplishments in their own right, but they didn’t come out of…

Why Do Zombies Shuffle?

This headline isn’t the set up for a joke (although I obviously welcome your punchlines in the comments); it’s a real question. Is there a neuroscientific basis for the prototypic zombie’s lumbering gait? Neuroscientists Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek wrote Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep? to provide readers a neuroscientific view of the zombie…

Your Brain’s Reaction To Gross Images Can Predict Your Political Views

Past studies have shown that people who self-identify as politically conservative are more likely to experience involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images. Now, researchers have taken things a step further by using brain scans to predict test subjects’ political leanings with freakishly high accuracy. Above: An example of a “disgusting image” shown to test subjects.…

This Brain Decoder Can Read the Words of Your Inner Monologue

If this sounds a bit like mind reading, well, it is. A group of neuroscientists have figured out how to decode a limited set of words “spoken” by our inner voices from looking at brain activity alone. The hard part, for now, is getting inside someone’s brain to record directly from their neurons. A study…

Brain Abnormalities Linked To Chronic Fatigue

People suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome are often told that their condition isn’t real — that it’s all in their head. It turns out this is true — but in a very literal sense. Researchers have learned that the brains of CFS patients have very specific brain abnormalities, a discovery that will lead to better…

Understand neuroscience with these neat animations by Harvard University

When I first heard of Harvard’s Fundamentals of Neuroscience online course, I thought it was going to be so hard to understand that I would have a seizure before the end of the first video. But no, thanks to the cool and straightforward animation it is actually very easy to get it. https://vimeo.com/101424066 SPLOID is…

Breakthrough: Scientists Use Sound To Breach The Blood-Brain Barrier

For the first time ever in humans, neuroscientists have penetrated the stubborn barrier that protects the brain from toxins in the bloodstream. The breakthrough means that doctors can now deliver drugs to previously inaccessible parts of the brain, making it easier to treat cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Top image: C.J. Guerin, MRC Toxicology Unit /…

Paralyzed Man Walks Again After Brain Cells Are Injected into His Spine

Back in 2010, Darek Fidyka became paralyzed from the waist down after suffering stab wounds to his back. Now, after 19 months of treatment in which cells from his brain were transplanted into his spinal column, he can walk with a frame. Researchers are calling it a “historic breakthrough.” The new technique, the details of…

What Exercise Does For Your Big Dumb Brain

Exercise is good for you, duh. Perhaps less obvious is all the ways physical exercise is also good for your brain—how it improves memory, creativity, mood, and more. So even if you aren’t looking to brag about marathon times or show off the body of a Greek god, you still have plenty of reasons to…

Brain Damage Can Be Grammar-Specific

We know that a specific form of magnetic stimulation to the brain can render people unable to speak. But it can get a lot more specific than that. Brain lesions can get so selective, they can knock out a particular form of grammar. Transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, is both fascinating and terrifying. During TMS,…

The Thoughts of Locked-In Patients, Visualized

These aren’t Second Life punks—they’re visualizations of what people with locked-in syndrome think, and they could help us communicate with people who can’t respond physically or verbally. Some people in a vegetative state can have an awareness of their surroundings, but they have no means of communicating to doctors, friends or family. So researchers at…

Why Conspiracy Theorists Are So Obsessed With JFK’s “Umbrella Man”

At the moment when bullets were being fired into JFK’s motorcade, a man can be seen standing on the side of the road near the car holding an open black umbrella. But it wasn’t raining. This is exactly the kind of detail that sets a fire under conspiracy theorists — and here’s why. Indeed, it…