Science

Chronic Stress … And How It Can Harm You

July 18, 2019

From an engineering standpoint, stress can be defined as the amount of resistance a material offers to being reshaped and reformed. When you place a load on a steel beam, the beam resists, keeping the building from collapsing. If the load is great enough, the beam gives way, and the structure suffers damage or collapses.

What Buddha Can Do For Your Brain

July 17, 2019

“Just try to pay attention to 10 breaths in a row, and that’s it. You’ve succeeded right there. Or just walk slowly back and forth across your room and make each step coincide with one breath. That’s a powerful practice, with enough stimulation in it to keep your head in the game if you’re distractible,” says Rick Hanson.

Developing Emotional Intelligence in Children

July 16, 2019

Emotional development begins very early in life — in infancy, when children first bond with their caregivers — and is not only significant to the formation of the architecture of the brain but has long-term consequences with the emergence of language and social skills. Early emotional intelligence lays the groundwork

Happiness Economics: Does Wealth Provide Happiness?

July 15, 2019

Whether money can buy happiness has been a hotly debated topic among economists for decades. While a section says rich people are in general happier than the poor, the others reckon that economic growth hardly results in long-lasting happiness. Turns out, neither is completely true.

Virtually Better: How Virtual Reality Is Helping Treat Social Anxiety

July 13, 2019

Exposing patients to fears in the real world involves unpredictability and uncertainty, where things can go awry, risking reinforcing a patient’s fear. In light of this, some psychologists are now embracing virtual reality technologies, which are offering a new form of exposure therapy to patients

Neuron to Neuron: Dr. Richard Tsien on Critical Communication Within Your Body

July 9, 2019

Dr. Richard Tsien is the world’s leading authority on the role of voltage-gated calcium channels. Without calcium channels our hearts would stop, we would have no motor skills and, ultimately, no ability to move and no memories.

Video Games According to “Brain Age” Creator Ryuta Kawashima

July 8, 2019

Dr. Ryuta Kawashima has been interested in the human brain ever since he was in the eighth grade. Curious about the role of human beings in the world and how the trajectory of our species would pan out in the future, he dreamed of downloading his own brain into a computer to witness

The Man Who Couldn’t Feel

July 3, 2019

“Christina Taylor” (not her real name) recalled her early impressions of her husband of 18 years, “David,” as being emotionally steady. “I never saw any emotion, but I didn’t think much about it then, because he was so level-headed, and never angry,” says Christina, a 48-year-old science teacher in Michigan.

Creative Listening: How Music Can Boost Your Creativity

June 30, 2019

When you think of “creativity,” you might conjure up images of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” or of a writer spending long hours agonizing over her next novel, hoping to be the next Joyce Carol Oates. While these are certainly monumentally important creative endeavors, this knee-jerk reaction

Night Eating Syndrome: Causes and Concerns

June 29, 2019

Do you consume more than a quarter of your daily calories after your evening meal? Do you have trouble falling asleep or suffer from insomnia during the night? Is your appetite for breakfast generally lacking? If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, you have a condition called “night eating syndrome”

“Sorry.” (Brain Freeze) “Oops.” — What Happens During A “Retrieval Failure”

June 27, 2019

We’ve all been there before. Tennis players can relate when the match is on their racquet and they feel frozen in space like they’ve never swung before. Their feet don’t move, their arms are like blocks of stone and the object they’re holding feels as foreign to them as a cell phone would to a caveman.

A Sudden and Lasting Separation from a Parent Can Permanently Alter Brain Development

June 26, 2019

At birth, the brain is the most underdeveloped organ in our body. It takes up until our mid-20s for our brains to fully mature. Any serious and prolonged adversity, such as a sudden, unexpected, and lasting separation from a caretaker, changes the structure of the developing brain. It damages a child’s

What is Consciousness? Dr. Michael Graziano on Attention Schema Theory

June 22, 2019

“To approach consciousness scientifically, we can’t start with an assumption of magic,” Dr. Michael Graziano claims. The brain’s knowledge of itself is too biased and sketchy to rely on intuition. Instead, he suggests a purely rationalist approach looking at how the brain attributes awareness to itself

Did Making Stone Tools Get People Talking? (Where Are We Headed Today?)

June 15, 2019

Centuries ago, our hominin ancestors — apes that have been linked to all modern humans via mitochondrial DNA evidence — began a great migration across the African continent, first originating in the deserts before the land became too harsh to support life. According to some recent studies, apes like

Total Recall: Marilu Henner Can’t Forget (Even If She Wanted To)

June 15, 2019

Known to most people as the star of TV series like “Taxi” and the author of self-help books about health, diet, and lifestyle, Marilu Henner has a more unusual claim to fame, one that puts her in a very elite minority: She is one of a handful of people confirmed to have highly superior autobiographical memory.

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A magazine dedicated to the brain.

We believe that neuroscience is the next great scientific frontier, and that advances in understanding the nature of the brain, consciousness, behavior, and health will transform human life in this century.

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