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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
We are saddened to hear of the death of Suzanne Corkin (MIT). Suzanne Corkin, whose painstaking work with a famous amnesiac known as H.M. helped clarify the biology of memory and its disorders, died on Tuesday in Danvers, Mass. She was 79. Sue was a phenomenal neuroscientist and communicator who carely deeply about her work, especially […]
Guest Post by Angela Grant, Pennsylvania State University Tell me if this sounds familiar: You just turned the light off, your head is on the pillow, your eyes are closed, and yet instead of drifting off to dreamland, you find yourself thinking about something that happened earlier in the day. Frustrating as rehashing those memories […]
Actions may speak more melodically than sounds. A new study shows that playing a melody on a musical instrument enhances how those melodies are perceived and remembered, above and beyond just listening to them. “We wanted to understand how the auditory system encodes and responds to musical events that the motor system has learned, says […]
Mapping and analyzing the brain at the level of neural circuitry – “human connectomics” – is hotter than ever. Many scientists think that by mapping neuronal connections in the brain, we will both better understand cognition and better be able to treat any deficits. Talking of its $40 billion Human Connectome Project, the National Institute of Health says it “will lead to […]
