We searched our blog archives for some of our favorite stories of the year. Exercise, art, language, and the social and developing brain top our 15 stories from 2015: Nature and nurture 1. Why It Should Always Be the Season for Exercise Michelle Voss (University of Iowa) talks about progress in her lab and others […]
Archives for 2015
Simulating Real-World Emotion in the Lab: A New Method
There are many moments in a day where we might have a brief emotional reaction to something – like smiling when we see a baby smile or grimacing when we see a baby crying. We experience continuum of emotions from the very brief in-the-moment reactions to the sustained emotions that impact our behavior at a […]
Teasing Apart Depression from Traumatic Brain Injury
Every time an external force severely injures the brain – whether through a car accident, fall, war injury, or sports trauma – it leaves a lasting impact. For people with traumatic brain injury (TBI), one of the leading causes of death and injury worldwide, depression is a common symptom, occurring in half of all patients. […]
Does the Nose Know?
Guest Post by Lisa Qu, Northwestern University Smelling a cup of freshly brewed coffee can be a rich, almost magical, experience. In fact, in that brief moment, you are smelling a mixture of more than 800 different molecules that make up the smell of coffee. Part of what makes that experience so rich also makes […]
Strategic Exploration in the Teen Brain
Teenagers like to explore and push boundaries but not all exploration is the same. Neuroscientists have yet to fully distinguish between risk-taking, for example, as compared with strategically exploring novel experiences. A new study shows marked differences in brain activity among individual teens who are more or less exploratory. The work could help shape future […]
Have Schools Forgotten Brain Science?
Guest Post by Chris Forsythe, Sandia National Laboratories Being an applied neuroscientist, I was stunned as I skimmed my daughter’s 7th grade life science textbook and found that only 8 out of 400 pages discussed the nervous system. This amounted to one section of one chapter. In contrast, while genetics are certainly important, there were […]
Battle of the Memories: Can an Old Memory Boost Our Ability to Remember New Things?
Our day-to-day lives can be thought of as a battle on the neural level. We have tons of stimuli fighting for our attention and of those, only a few will stick. I am often surprised by which things stick in my memory for the long-term, a particular shirt I wore or a line from a […]
Faces Distract Our Movements, Especially Emotional Ones
It’s breakfast time, and you head to the fridge to grab some orange juice but just as you go to pour it into your cup, you hear someone calling to you, turn toward the sound, and pour it into your cereal bowl instead or maybe even onto the floor. We’ve all been there – had […]
Early Childhood Neglect Impairs Mechanism for Communicating Across Brain Regions
For the past 15 years, researchers have been studying the effects of neglect on the developing brain through the study of Romanian orphans. The work has spawned dozens of papers, and even a book, detailing the profound consequences of early institutionalization on brain and behavior development. In one of the latest studies, researchers found that […]
Cochlear Implants Enable Deaf Children to Distinguish Basic Linguistic Features Rapidly
For parents of deaf children, deciding whether to get a cochlear implant can be tough. The great hope is that an implant will help deaf children gain oral language skills. Behavioral data has suggested that congenitally deaf children best receive implants by age 4, but little has been known about how they perceive their first […]
