Cognitive Neuroscience Society

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

As I write this, I am in a crowded room surrounded by different voices, a blowing A/C, footsteps down the hall and the sound of typing from various laptops. How can I best focus on a single voice? Turns out the background noise matters: According to a new study, our brain uniquely processes different types […]

Guest Post by Brandon Levy, NIMH In February 2012, Florida neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin after calling 911 to report a “suspicious person” in his neighborhood. In November 2014, 12-year-old Tamir Rice was shot by a Cleveland police officer while playing in a public park with a toy gun. Nearly […]

CNS 2016: Advances for Brain Science and Society Join us in the Big Apple to explore the underlying nature of how we think! Press registration is now open for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual conference, April 2-5, 2016, in New York City, at the New York Hilton Midtown. Get great story ideas and connect with […]

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 […]

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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]