Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk
[ad_1] Medieval monks were, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early…
How Your Brain Distinguishes Memories From Perceptions
[ad_1] Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that…
Your Brain Uses Calculus to Control Fast Movements
[ad_1] A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of…
All the Actually Important Stuff Neuralink Just Announced
[ad_1] The most widely tested brain implant is the Utah array—a hard silicon square with 100 tiny protruding needles. Each about a millimeter long, the needles have electrodes on their…
For Alzheimer’s Scientists, the Amyloid Debate Has No Easy Answers
[ad_1] Watching the Alzheimer’s research world from the outside over the past two years has felt like a car ride over an unpaved mountain road without a seatbelt. In 2021,…
Sorry, Prey. Black Widows Have Surprisingly Good Memory
[ad_1] Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved…
This Brain Molecule Decides Which Memories Are Happy—or Terrible
[ad_1] Further evidence of this bias comes from the reaction of the mice when they were first put into learning situations. Before they knew whether the new associations would be…
The Quest to Treat Binge-Eating and Addiction—With Brain Zaps
[ad_1] “It may be that stimulation of the nucleus accumbens altered the reward circuitry in the brain such that it turned down the volume on the pleasurable craving that patients…
Lab-Grown Human Brain Tissue Works in Rats
[ad_1] The tiny blobs of lab-grown human brain tissue were just specks, each measuring a few millimeters in diameter. Researchers at Stanford University made them by cultivating human stem cells…
Why Can’t You Tickle Yourself? Neuroscientists Unravel the Mystery
[ad_1] In the new study’s first phase, each subject had their moment in front of the GoPros and microphone. Previous studies have established that tickling is mood-dependent—anxiety and unfamiliarity suppress…
A Huge New Data Set Pushes the Limits of Neuroscience
[ad_1] So neuroscientists use an approach called “dimensionality reduction” to make such visualization possible—they take data from thousands of neurons and, by applying clever techniques from linear algebra, describe their…
Self-Taught AI May Have a Lot in Common With the Human Brain
[ad_1] For a decade now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat”…
To Understand Brain Disorders, Consider the Astrocyte
[ad_1] This was slow going. “We spent a lot of time, probably the first couple of years, really just working out the immunopanning and culturing the astrocytes,” recalls Caldwell. One…
Why Pain Feels Worse at Night
[ad_1] It’s long been a mystery why one of the most basic human experiences—feeling physical pain—fluctuates in intensity throughout the day. Since the early days of medicine, doctors and patients…
This Man Set the Record for Wearing a Brain-Computer Interface
[ad_1] With so few people outfitted with these devices, their longevity is still unknown. So far, the Utah array has lasted up to 10 years in monkeys. In Copeland’s case,…
The Curious Afterlife of a Brain Trauma Survivor
[ad_1] Sophie Papp and her family had a ritual for the recently departed. Whenever a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all squeeze into a car and…
What to Ask Your Doctor If You’re Getting Medical Tech Implanted
[ad_1] Three years ago, I walked from my office in a hospital to meet my boss, a neurosurgeon. On the way, I felt my entire body slow down. After two…
VR Still Stinks Because It Doesn’t Smell
[ad_1] VR still stinks, and its stench has many notes. It reeks of rich white guys, who wildly overfund and consistently overhype the always-on-the-verge-of-a-breakthrough technology. It has a festering funk…