The paintings of Paul Cézanne, whose birthday we celebrated this week, transport us to a different time and different place. His use of color and brushstroke force us to look at people and places in new ways. But any person’s evaluation of a single piece of art, of course, is subjective. While some may gravitate […]
Memories of a Man Who Revolutionized How We Understand Memory
CNS 2014 Blog: Keynote Address by Suzanne Corkin Let’s test your memory: What did you eat for dinner last night? That’s an easy answer. How about what’s the capital of Paris? For most, that’s easy as well. How about this one: How do the pedals work on a bike? That one may be tougher to […]
Our Brains Are Not Split When it Comes to Word Versus Face Recognition
CNS 2014 Blog: Q&A with Marlene Behrmann The idea of being left-brained or right-brained is pervasive in society. But scientists now know that it is not so simple. While some skills may over time develop to depend more on one side of the brain, the two hemispheres work interdependently from birth. Case in point is […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: Moving Away from “Fear” to Unify Field of Mind Science
Behavioral scientists need to move away from using terms like “fear” when discussing the workings of the brain, to better integrate the study of the mind. That was Joseph LeDoux’s message during Tuesday morning’s keynote session at CNS 2013. The New York University-based scientist argued that, to minimize confusion around such terms as “fear” and […]
CNS 2013 Meeting: Making Decisions Based on Context: A New Mechanism Gains Traction
The audience for Sunday morning’s keynote lecture at CNS 2013 got to play the part of monkeys during a talk by William Newsome of Stanford University, though our task was a bit easier than what his test monkeys usually experience. Normally, in Newsome’s experiment, monkeys have 750 milliseconds to determine either whether a flashing field […]
Threats, Survival, and Fear: Q&A with Joseph LeDoux
With Halloween around the corner, fear may be on your mind. As a basic emotion, fear develops when we react to an immediate danger. Understanding exactly how our brains detect and respond to such danger has been a goal of Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University for much of […]
