In a new book, Steve Ramirez explores the potential of memory manipulation to ease depression and other afflictions.
Tag: brain
At the Paris Brain Institute, a team of scientists is exploring the mental processes that occur during the transition from wakefulness to sleep, with potential clinical applications.
As a European court rules that the iconic toy can’t be trademarked, we go back to an earlier interview with Erno Rubik, who explained what inspired him to design that singular brain-and-fingers toy that has sold billions. And why it may be more relevant than ever in our digital world.
Classifying students as visual, auditory, or tactile learners can actually do more harm than good. Research shows what truly improves learning.
What do we know about what goes on in our bodies, and especially in our brains, when we’re in love? A new French essay, “Cerveau, sexe et amour” (Brain, Sex and Love), looks into this question.
Have you ever been torn between two emotions and don’t know why? Research is uncovering how your brain can cause you experience two conflicting emotions at the same time.
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The Underbelly Of The Meditation Boom
For years, mindfulness has been promoted as a near panacea. But just how much does the brain affect the body?
A new flood of consumer-facing neuroscience-driven products, including those using electroencephalograms (EEGs) raise complicated questions about data privacy and beyond.
Scientists need to learn more about climate change’s negative impact on the nervous system in order to mitigate it.
From self-induced trance to psychedelics, altered states of consciousness are experiencing a renewed interest in the scientific community for their therapeutic value.
Our carelessness toward the environment could be due, in part, to the functioning of a very primitive area of our brain: the striatum.
With COVID-19 vaccines working and restrictions lifting across the country, it’s finally time for those now vaccinated who’ve been hunkered down at home to ditch the sweatpants and reemerge from their Netflix caves. But your brain may not be so eager to dive back into your former social life. Social distancing measures proved essential for slowing COVID-19’s spread worldwide – preventing upward of an estimated 500 million cases. But, while necessary, 15 months away from each other has taken a toll on people’s mental health. So how can people be so lonely yet so nervous about refilling their social calendars? […]
SEOUL — A recently retired senior manager from South Korean electronics giant Samsung is back to work — in China. Referred to just by his last name, Kim, had been executive director responsible for electronic chip design (D-RAM) at the Seoul-based multinational. But just before he was set to begin his senior position at the […]
Why we should force the powerful to submit to psychological and neurological examinations on a regular basis.
Foreign scientists working in the U.S. are seeking job prospects in Switzerland as they contemplate leaving a country under an unfriendly administration. For one Swiss agency, that’s not necessarily good news.
Several decades of reflection and study have led neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux to stake out a new field that shows how art influences the brain.
HAMBURG — In Birgit Böhm’s opinion, the “4” she’s looking at is balancing on one leg, like in the nursery rhyme “A little man in the forest,” and wearing a little red cloak. The “7” next to it looks like it’s made of thick gardening wire. And it’s green! The rest of the numbers and […]
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Learning And Playing Music Makes You Smarter
Musical education, not only at a young age but also into adulthood, could have a significant and lasting impact on the development of the brain as well as on speech awareness, a study published in the The Journal of Neuroscience reveals. According to the researchers from Canada’s Rotman Institute, practicing music before the age of […]
Why do our hands wander toward our faces: stroking chins, scratching eyebrows, rubbing noses? German researchers have discovered the neurology and psychology at play.
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Are Mind-Powered Drones Next?
MUNICH — As the pilot sits in the cockpit with his hands in his lap, the airplane’s control stick moves all by itself. The plane lands perfectly. Automatic pilot? No, the pilot controls the flight simulator — using only the power of thought. From electrodes on the test pilot’s head, “We read brain signals that […]
Falsely considered a type of magic, achieving hypnotic trance is already part of our everyday lives. Its potential applications for medical science are vast, if still largely unexplained.
BUENOS AIRES – The announcement came this weekend that Argentine President Cristina Kirchner will be recuperating for at least the next month from a brain condition brought on by a head injury in August. While the news is shaking up the nation, it is also putting a veil across a potential political crisis for Argentina. […]
GENEVA — No need to read Plato’s complete works or learn by heart the words of the Dalai Lama to understand the meaning of happiness. Science may have the answers. At the University Hospital of Geneva (UHG), neurologist Fabienne Picard has been studying for years a very rare phenomenon that scientific literature barely talks about […]
PHOENIX – Eight years ago, as brain researchers Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik were driving down the Las Vegas Strip, the billboards they passed suddenly got them to rethink about the brain’s capacity to process visual information. Until then, the two professors at the prestigious Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona had addressed this question by […]
GENEVA – For a long time, the brain was considered a kind of black box, whose internal workings were largely a mystery. But recently, this special organ has started yielding its secrets, thanks in part to the progress made in the field of genetics. Neuroscientists from the University of Geneva have achieved a breakthrough that […]
GRENOBLE – Since 2009, a team of 30 researchers from the Clinatec biomedical platform of the French Alternative Energies And Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) has been tackling a huge challenge: allowing quadriplegics to walk and open a door thanks to a brain-controlled implant system. For this to happen, the CEA is relying on different technologies […]
GENEVA – Chances are that at least once in your life you’ve found yourself at a restaurant, sitting next to someone who claims to know everything about wine. They usually hold their glass up toward the light to see the color of the wine, talk about tannins, grape variety, soil quality… Of course, the most […]
BOCHUM – Intensive sports make our muscles grow – nothing new there. But now clinical neurophysiologists from Germany’s Ruhr-University Bochum (RUB) have shown that sports can change our brain too. For their research, 26 high-performance athletes (half of them practitioners of judo and karate, the other half marathon runners and triathletes), and 12 non-athletes, had […]
GENEVA – It’s called simply, “Human Brain Project” (HBP), and it is as audacious as it is ambitious: 256 individual labs scattered across 24 countries in order to create a virtual human brain. Though only officially awarded a one-billion-euro grant Monday by the European Union, the debate around the endeavor has been brewing for years […]
REUTERS, BEERSHEBA – Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has been in a coma for seven years, has surprised doctors by showing brain activity and a “certain degree of consciousness” for the first time since his debilitating stroke. The extent of the 84-year-old’s response is still limited as he cannot move any muscle, though […]
For many researchers, one measure of intelligence is the ratio of brain size to body weight. But that would mean that the tiny mammal known as the shrew would be capable of great intellectual accomplishments, which it is not presently known for. Why is this? A human brain weighs 1.3 to 1.5 kilos (2.9 to […]
She remembers her panic attacks at age six, whenever she lost sight of her mother at the supermarket. Later, to avoid getting lost on her way to high school, she was constantly accompanied. Andrea* is now 47-years-old and lives with her father in Vancouver, Canada. To go to work, she follows an itinerary that is […]