CNS 2025 Q&A with André Bastos In some moments in time, technology seems to catch up with theory in powerful ways to elucidate new truths about fundamental processes in the brain. Now is that moment for understanding how brain rhythms coordinate to make everyday predictions that guide our learning and decision-making, says André Bastos, a […]
CNS 2025 Q&A with Emily Finn In today’s highly polarized society, most people can at least agree to the idea that any two individuals can view an event in vastly different ways. And those perceptions become our reality. But how can scientists study those perceptions in a robust way that speaks not only to the […]
CNS 2025: Q&A with Marie Banich Marie Banich’s journey in cognitive neuroscience started with very personal motivations: first from a curiosity about what her family’s propensity for left handedness meant and then to a drive to help people who suffer from unwanted thoughts, after witnessing the devastating effects that had on a loved one. But […]
CNS 2025: Q&A with Ken Paller What started for Ken Paller as traditional memory research in cognitive neuroscience has now turned into an integrated approach to understanding memory, sleep, and dreams. In addition to using novel tools and technologies to modify sleep, the work also connects with Indo-Tibetan Buddhist literature and principles. For the past […]
CNS 2025: Q&A with Adriana Galván As a parent of a teen, it can be crushingly difficult to sort through the social drama while attempting to provide guidance that you hope will keep your teen safe. Cognitive neuroscientists are finding, however, that the adolescent brain has its own mechanisms of guiding teens through strategic risk-taking […]
Bad experiences can shape our lives in unconscious ways. If you, say, tried a new dish at a restaurant and got food poisoning, you may not only avoid that restaurant in the future but potentially that dish, even in other settings. Researchers have documented in many studies how negative emotions can shape our memories and […]
We’ve all experienced it – reading some pages in a book when your mind starts to drift and then realizing that you missed a key point and have to go back and reread the same page. The experience of mind wandering appears throughout our daily lives, whether reading, driving home from work, or even when […]
CNS 2024 guest post by Julia Cardarelli Preparing to write this post about new memory research presented at CNS 2024 in Toronto required me to search my own memories for what I found most salient. A lot of my recall from the event comes down to certain factors that affect how we form memories, how […]
In the Roald Dahl book The BFG, a “Big Friendly Giant” spends his time blowing happy dreams into children that he has collected from Dream Country. In modern neuroscience labs, some researchers are now working to “blow” dreams into people, collecting them via high-tech ”Dream Country” of sorts: virtual reality (VR). They are using VR […]
CNS 2024 Every day, we have an almost nonstop view of different actions unfolding around us, whether in traffic watching cars, on TV observing people interact, or at a park seeing dogs and kids playing. For scientists trying to understand how we take in such visual information, it is often easiest to isolate certain features, […]
