This Is Your Brain In Love
By Mariella Careaga
Just like any other emotion, love has more to do with the brain than you might think.
Among all emotions, love seems to have a special place…
Read more
Prefrontal Cortex
The Fatal Relationship Between Firearm Policy and Brain Development
By Vincent A Medina
Gun deaths in the United States far exceed those of every other developed country in the world (Sam & Rupp, 2022). This has prompted frequent discussions…
Read more
The Neuroscience of Motivation and How to Improve It
Motivation can be a hard thing to come by. Whether at home, at school or at work, most of us have been in a situation where we know exactly what…
Read more
Are children with Angelman syndrome really happy?
This post was updated on April 24, 2019 to incorporate feedback from parents. Names have been changed to protect anonymity.
What is health? What is happiness? We generally imagine the…
Read more
The emergence of a hive mind: Should we worry?
he term “hive mind” refers to the apparent intelligence that emerges at the group level in some social species, particularly insects like honeybees and ants. An individual honeybee might not…
Read more
When You Split the Brain, Do You Split the Person?
he brain is perhaps the most complex machine in the Universe. It consists of two cerebral hemispheres, each with many different modules. Fortunately, all these separate parts are not autonomous…
Read more
Weird Animal Brain: Woodpecker
Brain damage is a major concern for us humans – car accidents, football, falling backwards. It’s pretty easy to cause a concussion. Woodpeckers, however, pound away daily using much more…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
Self Reflected: The Best of Neuroscience and Art
The phrase, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” seems especially true for scientists. What we study becomes not only intellectually beautiful, but also literally beautiful: the form is…
Read more
Bite-size Science: Epigenetics help protect the aging brain
Epigenetics change which genes are active and which are inactive. Research over the past few years has shown that these changes are important for protecting the brain from neurodegeneration and…
Read more
What is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder?
Our thoughts are often mysterious to us. You probably don’t know why you suddenly think about a Komodo dragon while sitting in traffic or Citizen Kane while shopping for groceries.…
Read more
Can Neuroscience Explain the Mandela Effect?
Would you trust a memory if it felt as real as all your others? And other people confirmed they remember it, too? What if the memory turned out to be…
Read more
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…
Read more
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…
Read more
Digging Out the “Earworms:” Involuntary Musical Imagery Correlates with Cortical Structure
You don’t know you know this song, but you definitely know this song: “Hey Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you…” Did the end of the lyric materialize in…
Read more
A Tale of Monogamy and Dopamine
In a recent hack, private information from nearly 30 million users was leaked from Ashley Madison, a “dating” website intended to facilitate extramarital affairs. The sheer number of Ashley Madison…
Read more
Smells Like Teen Synapses: A Look Inside Adolescent Brains and Behaviors
“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child,…
Read more
Mapping Brain Connectivity Using Graph Theory
Have you ever wondered why the same brain regions are often implicated again and again in many tasks and behaviors? For instance, the prefrontal cortex is implicated in so many…
Read more
Memory Hack: Manipulating the Brain’s Memory Cache
Imagine having a memory that haunts you, sneaks into your daily thoughts and turns over on itself in your dreams. Escape seems impossible. Now imagine you are injected with a…
Read more
Keeping Memories Fresh by Keeping Glutamate In Check
We are another year older, perhaps a little wiser, and probably more forgetful. Indeed, making memories is quite a process in the brain: specific synaptic connections are strengthened and new…
Read more
A New Year. A New You.
Yesterday, millions of people across the world made New Year’s resolutions to lose weight, quit smoking, or follow their dreams. Chances are that this isn’t the first time they made…
Read more
2013: Making and Breaking Resolutions
Tomorrow, it will be 2013! And while it may seem that the world around us has not changed, calendars and clocks remind us that it’s time to kick old habits,…
Read more
