Bad experiences can shape our lives in unconscious ways. If you, say, tried a new dish at a restaurant and got food poisoning, you may not only avoid that restaurant in the future but potentially that dish, even in other settings. Researchers have documented in many studies how negative emotions can shape our memories and […]

We’ve all experienced it – reading some pages in a book when your mind starts to drift and then realizing that you missed a key point and have to go back and reread the same page. The experience of mind wandering appears throughout our daily lives, whether reading, driving home from work, or even when […]

CNS 2024 guest post by Julia Cardarelli Preparing to write this post about new memory research presented at CNS 2024 in Toronto required me to search my own memories for what I found most salient. A lot of my recall from the event comes down to certain factors that affect how we form memories, how […]

In the Roald Dahl book The BFG, a “Big Friendly Giant” spends his time blowing happy dreams into children that he has collected from Dream Country. In modern neuroscience labs, some researchers are now working to “blow” dreams into people, collecting them via  high-tech ”Dream Country” of sorts: virtual reality (VR). They are using VR […]

CNS 2024 Every day, we have an almost nonstop view of different actions unfolding around us, whether in traffic watching cars, on TV observing people interact, or at a park seeing dogs and kids playing. For scientists trying to understand how we take in such visual information, it is often easiest to isolate certain features, […]