A Look Inside the Brain
Neuroscience is a broad scientific field that encompasses many different types of research. This research ranges from the microscopic level such as basic protein interactions, genes, and cells, to the…
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EEG
Problems with Assessing Consciousness in the 21st Century
by Caitlin Goodpaster
Early this June, a viral story hit the internet—an engineer at Google had claimed an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot named LaMDA was conscious (Tiku, 2022). LaMDA, which…
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¿Cómo sabemos? El valor de los modelos científicos.
Artículo original: How Do We Know? The Value of Scientific Models Joel Frohlich
Traducido por Reyna Ediss, Dalí Jiménez, Mariangelina Martínez, Estefany Ochoa y Keya Vijapure.
El mes pasado, los…
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La Optogenética: Una Herramienta Iluminadora con un Futuro Brillante
Artículo original: Optogenetics: An Illuminating Tool with a Bright Future , Jeff Olney
Traducido por Valia Gregory
Casi todo lo que hacemos requiere del cerebro de alguna manera. ¿Comer una…
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Lo Que Aprendí al Realizar Seguimiento de Mi Sueño con Fitbit Durante Dos Meses
Artículo original: What I Learned from Tracking My Sleep with Fitbit for Two Months, Joel Frohlich
Traducido por Daniela Semerjian y Delaney Ivey
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Si alguien me hubiera dicho hace un…
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La Parálisis del Sueño ¿Qué es y qué lo causa?
Artículo original: Sleep Paralysis: What Is It and What Causes It?, Mira Rakicevic
Traducido por Valia Gregory
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La parálisis del sueño es un tipo de parasomnia (un término general…
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Dialogues in Music Therapy and Social Neuroscience: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Clinical Progress
In his book “Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain”, the neurologist Oliver Sacks stated that music can “calm us, animate us, comfort us, thrill us, or serve to organize…
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Optogenetics: An Illuminating Tool with A Bright Future
Nearly everything we do requires our brain in some way. Eating a bagel? That uses your brain. Reading this article? That’s using your brain, too. All those questionable decisions you…
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Sleep Paralysis: What Is It and What Causes It?
Sleep paralysis is a type of REM parasomnia or abnormal behavior that takes place during the REM sleep cycle. Also known as sleep atonia, this condition refers to the feeling…
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How Pain in Newborns Can Have Lifelong Consequences
You probably don’t remember anything from when you were an infant. However, chances are that you experienced some pain immediately after you were born. You might have needed an IV…
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What I Learned from Tracking My Sleep with Fitbit for Two Months
If someone had told me a year ago that he sleeps with his watch on at night, I’d probably wonder just how eccentric of a personality I was dealing with.…
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[Podcast] Uploading the Human Brain
n a brand new episode of the Knowing Neurons podcast, we explore the concept of “mind uploading”. How would something like a mind upload really work?…
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Our Dreams Have Many Purposes, Changing Across the Lifespan
lthough radically different in terms of their content and feel, the range of dream states are just as complex as waking states. If we look across an individual’s lifetime, we…
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How Neuroimaging Changes Our View of Science & Humanity
Magritte’s comments on our fascination with the unknown rings true not just in artistic surrealism, but also in many of our scientific research endeavors. The human mind is continually fascinated…
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Reading: The Brain’s Best Hijacker
What are you doing right now? I’m no psychic, but I can say for certain one thing that you’re doing: reading. You’re reading this sentence, word by word, and extracting…
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PET Imaging: The Real Positronic Brain?
In Isaac Asimov’s 1950 short story collection I, Robot, intelligent robots with positronic brains exist alongside humans. Unlike conventional computer hardware, the word positronic implies that electrical current is carried…
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Final Decision? Why the Brain Keeps on Changing its Mind
Benjamin Franklin once quipped: ‘There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know oneself.’ Every decision we make, from pinpointing the source of a faint sound to…
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Excitation and Inhibition: The Yin and Yang of the Brain
To make a working nervous system, only two forces are necessary: excitation and inhibition.…
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Stimulating Neural Circuits with Magnetism
Brain stimulation might sound like some Frankensteinian demonstration from a Victorian science fair. But in reality, it is a contemporary technique making a huge impact in neuroscience by addressing a…
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Weird animal brain: Bottlenose dolphin
Marine mammals, such as dolphins, whales, and porpoises, spend their entire lives at sea. Like us, they need to breathe, avoid danger, and care for their young. Like us, they…
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Meet our newest team member Kayleen Schreiber
We have someone new joining our team! She is a neuroscience PhD student at the University of Iowa, and she studies speech perception – but let’s let the animation she created…
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Neuron See, Neuron Do: The Mirror Neuron System and Clinical Implications
If you grew up with siblings, it is likely that you have heard the phrase, ”Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” However, it wasn’t until a groundbreaking finding in…
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Brain Waves and Beta Buzz: The Wild Story of Neural Oscillations
What are brain waves? It’s no wonder the term sounds like science fiction. In the 1920s, a German psychiatrist embarked on a highly personal quest to discover the supposed medium…
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Teleportation! Hippocampal Oscillations during Navigation
Who hasn’t wanted to snap their fingers and dive into the pages of the gorgeous places featured in National Geographic? Caught in a miserable physics exam that you haven’t studied…
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Does Free Will Exist?
It’s a lazy Sunday afternoon. Professor Freeman is enjoying the Southern California weather on Professor Domino’s patio.
Domino: Will it be Coke or Pepsi, Dr. Freeman?
Freeman: That’s an easy…
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How Do We Know? The Value of Scientific Models.
Last month, astronomers announced the prediction of a new giant planet in our solar system dubbed Planet IX, a genuine ninth planet with ten times the mass of Earth. The…
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The Fugue of Life: Why Complexity Matters in Physiology and Neuroscience
People like simplicity. Each decade, corporate logos grow progressively minimalistic, pop songs use ever simpler melodies, and visual art embraces simpler compositions, as Monet gives way to Picasso and Picasso…
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The Neuroscience of Star Wars
For the first time in over a decade, a new Star Wars film is upon us, and if you’re like the staff of Knowing Neurons, your nucleus accumbens is firing…
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Screensavers of the Brain: The Science of Dreaming
Each night, you place your head on your pillow, close your eyes, and, barring insomnia, you lose consciousness of the world around you, drifting into blissful oblivion. Eventually, you reawaken,…
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Ghost in the Machine: The Neuroscience of Consciousness
Some questions cannot be addressed by science. Like parallel universes, the consciousness of others is not something that can be directly observed, measured, or experienced. Rene Descartes famously said,
“I…
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Intracranial EEG and Mental Time Travel
A familiar progression of chords blares out of your speakers as the red lights of the surrounding traffic fade into the memory of a dark stage illuminated by pulsing neon lights.…
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Surfing Brainwaves with EEG: A Classic Tool for Recording Temporal Brain Dynamics
Pictures are powerful tools for illustrating quantitative data and capturing public interest. Each year, NASA releases many beautiful images of Martian dunes and distant nebulae which help win public funding.…
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