• Neurotransmitters that Help Control Unwanted Thoughts

    By lmunoz | December 7, 2017 | Comments Off on Neurotransmitters that Help Control Unwanted Thoughts

    Unwanted thoughts can haunt our daily lives – negative memories, worries, or simply off-task thinking. But most healthy adults can control such thoughts. For individuals suffering from neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), however, the ability to control such thoughts is greatly hampered. In a new study, neuroscientists have identified […]

  • Unwinding the Movie Reels in the Mind’s Eye

    By lmunoz | November 9, 2017 | Comments Off on Unwinding the Movie Reels in the Mind’s Eye

    I can see it all in my mind like a mini-movie: my family and I eating breakfast at the kitchen table, pouring cereal, drinking juice and coffee, and chatting. The body positioning, senses, and actions are all vividly recreated in my mind’s eye. We all do it to some extent every day – mentally recreate […]

  • Enhancing the Sleeping Brain

    By lmunoz | October 17, 2017 | Comments Off on Enhancing the Sleeping Brain

    Guest Post by Sadie (Sarah) Witkowski, Northwestern University As one of five children, my mom has plenty of stories about her and her siblings’ misadventures. One of my favorites revolves around my “weird” Uncle Dorsey and his early scientific endeavors. When my mom was about 8 years old, her older brother slipped a tape player under […]

  • The Effects of Stress on Learning Vary by Memory Type

    By lmunoz | September 28, 2017 | Comments Off on The Effects of Stress on Learning Vary by Memory Type

    The other day, I reset my password for a social media site. When I went to login today, I inadvertently entered the old password. When that happened, I was using my automatic, “stimulus-response” memory, a rigid, habit-like memory. When I then remembered I had changed my password, I tapped into a different type of memory, […]

  • Open Letter on New NIH Clinical Trials Policy

    By lmunoz | September 6, 2017 | Comments Off on Open Letter on New NIH Clinical Trials Policy

    The Cognitive Neuroscience Society is adding its voice questioning the new policy that NIH has adopted that fails to distinguish between basic research and clinical trials.  As a result of this policy, a wide array of basic research studies will be required to register as clinical trials starting in January 2018. The policy is described […]

  • Assessing Social Reasoning in Adolescence

    By lmunoz | August 8, 2017 | Comments Off on Assessing Social Reasoning in Adolescence

    Every day, we compare ourselves to others, both in person and increasingly online. Am I smarter than my friend? Am I nicer or friendlier? Such judgments require a type of “social reasoning” – first rating yourself and your friends and then making a comparison. Among adolescents, this type of thinking is even more common, with […]

  • Linking Words and Memories: How We Remember the Structure of Things

    By lmunoz | July 11, 2017 | Comments Off on Linking Words and Memories: How We Remember the Structure of Things

    Speaking at the Big Ideas in Neuroscience session at the recent CNS annual meeting, Angela Friederici of the Max Planck Institute discussed language as a unique human trait. Understanding of the words we use comes from different types of memories in different networks the brain. Neuroscientists often gain insight into these connections through individuals with […]

  • Buildings, Beauty, and the Brain: Q&A with Anjan Chatterjee

    By lmunoz | June 15, 2017 | Comments Off on Buildings, Beauty, and the Brain: Q&A with Anjan Chatterjee

    We all know intuitively that place shapes our everyday experiences. From the colors of the walls to the amount of light in the room, how we design buildings affects how we think, feel, and behave. A growing body of research is examining how architectural design affects us on the neural level. And a new research […]

  • Sorting Out What is Real: Q&A with Jon Simons

    By lmunoz | May 24, 2017 | Comments Off on Sorting Out What is Real: Q&A with Jon Simons

    At the CNS meeting last March in San Francisco, I learned a new term during Marcia Johnson’s Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award lecture: reality monitoring. Coined by Johnson, reality monitoring refers to how we distinguish what is real from what is imagined in our everyday lives. For some people, having an impairment in this seemingly […]

  • Your Brain on Channel Surfing

    By lmunoz | May 16, 2017 | Comments Off on Your Brain on Channel Surfing

    It’s Sunday morning and I am looking through tweets while watching the news. With smartphones now ubiquitous, such situation are increasingly common: taking in information with multiple interruptions, often by choice. In a new study, researchers studied this phenomenon on the neural level by having people watch movie clips in different combinations – finding significant […]

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