Implicit bias, plasticity, and language were front and center in the most popular CNS stories of 2016. From using neuroscience findings to help understand and reduce bias to exploring why some people learn a second language more easily than others to recent debates over neuroimaging techniques, cognitive neuroscientists continue to chart new territory in their […]
Archives for 2016
We’re Back: CNS 2017 Returns to San Francisco with Big Ideas and More
Go for a trolley ride, visit Alcatraz, and take in world-class cognitive science talks when you visit San Francisco for CNS 2017. From March 25-28, 2017, more than 1,500 cognitive neuroscientists will gather to discuss the latest research on memory, language, aging, learning, and more in 50 talks and more than 1,000 poster sessions. New this […]
Making Language Research Less Alien: The Science of Arrival
Outside of superintelligence thrillers like Lucy or Limitless, it’s rare to have a popular Hollywood blockbuster explore a sliver of cognitive neuroscience. Even rarer is for that sliver to involve language science, which is why I was thrilled to see linguistics front and center in Arrival. Aside from it being an intelligent, well-acted, and fun […]
We’re Hard Wired for Cranberry Sauce: Why Color Matters for Nutrition
Cranberry sauce is perhaps a non-obvious star of the Thanksgiving dinner table. With its rich red color – whether homemade or from the can – the holiday favorite is actually part of the hardwiring in our brain: A new study finds that people favor red-colored foods over green ones, and consistently undervalue the caloric content […]
Sleep Offers a Window Into Human Intelligence
Not a day goes by, it seems, without some reminder of how important sleep is for our brain health – whether a headline about the dangers of cell phone use before bed or the latest start-up encouraging its workers to nap during the day. While we are all increasingly aware of the necessity of sleep […]
Perceptions of Others’ Pain Rests on Perspective
While recently binge watching Game of Thrones, I frequently found myself reacting to particularly graphic scenes of violence as though I were about to directly experience those horrors. We have all had moments when we physically feel like we can feel the pain of others. But some experiences can feel like much more – like […]
Debunking the Myth that fMRI Studies are Invalid
Guest Post by David Mehler, Cardiff University and University of Münster Are fMRI studies valid? That is a question that has been posited across the news media the past month – including most recently in the New York Times – in the wake of a new study by Anders Eklund and colleagues at Linköping University […]
Brain Connectivity and Language Learning: New Findings, New Questions
Guest Post by Angela Grant, Pennsylvania State University Do you remember the last time you took a language course? No matter if it was online or classroom based, immersive or translation focused, I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that your language abilities when you left that course were different from […]
Decoding Reading in the Brain
Imagine trying to read a word – even this very sentence – and the letters all looking like a jumbled mess. You can see letters but they no longer make sense. This recently happened to patients who were in a unique study to investigate the origins of reading in the brain. These patients, who had […]
Eye Gaze and Turn Taking in Aphasia Patients
In every conversation you have, there is an unspoken code – a set of social rules that guide you. When to stop talking, where to look, when to listen and when to talk… While scientists have long understood this turn-taking behavior, less known has been what affects this ability in patients with aphasia, a disorder […]
