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It’s true of desk tops and bedrooms too…
Chaos drives the brain… Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular...
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Are you a man or a…
From the BBC, “Sex I.D.: The Brain-Sex Test“– complete a series of exercises, and discover whether your brain functions more like most men’s or most women’s. As we ponder the mysteries of gender, we...
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Maps of the Mind…
Mo Costandi, the Neurophilosophy blogger for The Guardian, has created a wonderful side-site, Neuro Images, a collection of pictures of the brain. From the scientific (like the image above) through...
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“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”*…
source The wonders of modern millinery… Caffeine-fueled cram sessions are routine occurrences on any college campus. But what if there was a better, safer way to learn new or difficult material more...
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“Neuroscience for the last couple hundred years has been on the wrong track”*…
In 2009, researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara performed a curious experiment. In many ways, it was routine — they placed a subject in the brain scanner, displayed some images,...
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“Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”*…
Imagine that a person’s brain could be scanned in great detail and recreated in a computer simulation. The person’s mind and memories, emotions and personality would be duplicated. In effect, a new...
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“So profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel...
A Neanderthal skull shows head trauma, evidence of ancient violence Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were...
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“I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my...
Like all other animals, our species evolved by gradual processes of natural selection that equipped us to survive and reproduce within a certain environmental niche. Unlike other animals, however,...
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“Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”*…
I have a confession. As a physicist and psychiatrist, I find it difficult to engage with conversations about consciousness. My biggest gripe is that the philosophers and cognitive scientists who...
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“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”*…
I’m not the first person to note that our understanding of ourselves and our society is heavily influenced by technological change – think of how we analogized biological and social functions to...
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“To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub”*…
I’m not the first person to note that our understanding of ourselves and our society is heavily influenced by technological change – think of how we analogized biological and social functions to...
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“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in...
For as long as humans have thought, humans have thought about thinking. George Cave on the power and the limits of the metaphors we’ve used to do that… For thousands of years, humans have described...
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“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created...
Christof Koch settles his bet with David Chalmers (with a case of wine) … perhaps especially not the problem of consciousness itself. At least for now… A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In...
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“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve...
The author, far left, as a very young child Our first three years are usually a blur, and we don’t remember much before age seven. Kristin Ohlson wondered why… … Freud argued that we repress our...
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“Zero is powerful because it is infinity’s twin. They are equal and opposite,...
Inside the Chaturbhuj Temple in India (left), a wall inscription features the oldest known instance of the digit zero, dated to 876 CE (right). It is part of the number 270. … and like infinity, zero...
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“The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless”*…
Still, it’s useful to know the difference… and as Yasemin Saplakoglu explains, that’s a complex process– one that science takes very seriously… As I sit at my desk typing up this newsletter, I can see...
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