As a master’s student studying paranormal beliefs and parapsychology some 15 years ago, Christian Rominger stumbled upon a paper by Paola Bressan about “meaningful coincidences” and why they might happen.  “What really caught my attention about meaningful coincidences is that they’re different from other paranormal ideas and phenomena. They’re tied closely to our behaviors and […]

When I was young, I remember first hearing the phrase “out-of-body experience” in reference to the Shirley Maclaine TV series “Out on a Limb.” At the time, I remember thinking of it as a mystical, mysterious state. Now, researchers know these experiences can happen through meditation, sensory deprivation, or when hearing death, but little is […]

School’s out for summer – at least in most places in the Northern Hemisphere. That means most kids will not be giving a lot of thought to math for a couple months, but for some cognitive neuroscientists, math will continue to be an important area of study. Cognitive scientists have long been interested in the […]

CNS 2023 Guest post by Casey M. Imperio (CNSTA) As the world begins to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, many fields are beginning to restructure how they view work-life balance. That theme was prevalent for cognitive neuroscience trainees at the 2023 CNS conference in San Francisco. At the CNS Training Association (CNSTA) panel, five esteemed […]

CNS 2023 When Norah Wolk reached out to scientists to see if she could discuss her research interests, she did not get many responses. A junior in high school at the time, “not many of them wanted to have a conversation with a high schooler,” she recalled. But it only took one responsive postdoctoral researcher […]

We closed out CNS 2023 in San Francisco in style with another excellent poster session, followed by a whopping 6 more symposia, including one on new studies in psychedelics and cognition, highlighted in a new press release. Check out some highlights in photos and tweets below: Poster Session F: Lots of stimulating cognitive neuroscience was […]

Tuesday, March 28, 2023 – San Francisco – The synthesis of LSD and psilocybin in the early to mid-20th century sparked not only a new counterculture in the United States but also a new interest in brain science, specifically the role of neurotransmitters. Despite these discoveries, research on psychedelics went dormant for decades due to […]

The third day of CNS 2023 in San Francisco included 4 symposia — on topics ranging from the a neurocomputational account of agency to how the brain continues to learn development, brain damage and competing demands — 2 poster sessions, the Young Investigator Award lectures by Anna Schapiro and Freek van Ede, and finally the […]

Sunday, March 26, 2023 – San Francisco – Forgetting is not always easy. If you have ever tried to erase that annoying earworm from your mind or stop thinking about whether you locked the door after leaving the house, you know how disruptive it can be to think about something irrelevant to the task at […]