Playing an Instrument Changes Our Perception of Music

The musical instrument you play, or played as a child, likely has a big impact on how you perceive music every day. In a novel new study looking at beatboxers and guitarists, cognitive neuroscientists found that areas of the brain that control movement were activated in the musicians’ brains but not in non-musicians’ brains. Past […]

Learning What to Learn: Lessons from Cognitive Neuroscience for Education

How do we learn what to learn? This fundamental question drives the work of Rachel Wu at the University of California, Riverside. Before we can learn anything, we need to know what to pay attention to. From infancy, people are bombarded with distractions that can make that challenging. While there is a wealth of cognitive […]

Taking Control of Your Brain Activity: New Neurofeedback Results

Summer is coming to an end, but imagine if your fun summer vacation experiences could later help you in addressing neuropsychological conditions. That’s a concept that inspires and motivates David Mehler, an MD/PhD student and cognitive neuroscientist at Cardiff University. “Imagine seeing a thermometer gauge that shows how strongly a specific part of your brain […]

The Centrality of Character to Storytelling in the Brain

While binge watching a new show, I sometimes wonder what’s keeping me watching even when the plot, well, falls apart. Usually, it has to do with the characters; watching them show after show makes it hard to separate from them even when the plot is no longer engaging. A new study about narrative storytelling might […]

A Dynamic Approach to Understanding Age-Related Memory Decline

Matthew Costello has been studying how aging affects cognition and perception for close to 10 years. But answers to the questions of exactly how and why visual working memory declines in older adults have still eluded him and other researchers. Now, he is taking an information processing approach to this topic that affects so many […]

The Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) is committed to the development of mind and brain research aimed at investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of cognition.

The term cognitive neuroscience has now been with us for almost three decades, and identifies an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the nature of thought.

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SAVE the DATE! CNS 2019

Mark your calendars for CNS 2019 in San Francisco, March 23-26, 2019!

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To kick off the 25th anniversary meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Michael Gazzaniga (University of California, Santa Barbara) took us back to the beginning of the field, and then on a whirlwind tour through the history of thought on consciousness. Gazzaniga believes that understanding how consciousness works will help define the future of brain science and artificial intelligence, and close the gap between brain and mind.

Four leading researchers, with expertise in neurophysiology, neuroimaging, artificial intelligence, language, and computation debated these big questions in “Big Data Versus Big Theory,” a special session at this year’s 25th annual CNS meeting in Boston.