Q&A with Muireann Irish Clinical populations can provide a wealth of data to cognitive neuroscientists working to understand the brain. By seeing what happens in the brain of someone who has a cognitive disorder, researchers can better identify the fundamental underlying mechanisms. That is certainly true for memory research, where individuals with dementia and Alzheimer’s […]
Going with the Flow: Mapping Information in the Human Brain
Q&A with Michael W. Cole Increasingly, cognitive neuroscientists are focusing on computation to better understand how information is stored and moves through the human brain. For Michael Cole, this work has included computer science at Apple and behavioral science at Berkeley, with him ultimately creating a cognitive neuroscience lab at Rutgers University that is taking […]
Working Out Working Memory: A Life’s Pursuit
Q&A with Earl Miller Working memory is key to our everyday survival — how we communicate, remember what we need to do, learn new things, and generally operate. It is also an aspect of cognition that is disrupted or dysfunctional in almost every neuropsychiatric disorder. Therefore, understanding how working memory works is of vital importance. […]
Going Deep on Sleep with Matthew Walker
Did you get enough sleep last night? Probably not, says Matthew Walker, cognitive neuroscientist and neurophysiologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Statistics show, he says, that two-thirds of adults fail to obtain the recommended 8 hours of nightly sleep. If that doesn’t seem like a big deal, Walker has some robust research to counter […]
Machine Learning to Help Move Beyond Diagnostic Labels for Struggling Learners
Anyone who has ever worked with children who are struggling at learning – whether a parent or teacher – knows that diagnostic labels can only go so far in helping individuals. While receiving a diagnosis is an important landmark moment for children and families, is it enough information to guide those who are trying to […]
Playing an Instrument Changes Our Perception of Music
The musical instrument you play, or played as a child, likely has a big impact on how you perceive music every day. In a novel new study looking at beatboxers and guitarists, cognitive neuroscientists found that areas of the brain that control movement were activated in the musicians’ brains but not in non-musicians’ brains. Past […]
Learning What to Learn: Lessons from Cognitive Neuroscience for Education
How do we learn what to learn? This fundamental question drives the work of Rachel Wu at the University of California, Riverside. Before we can learn anything, we need to know what to pay attention to. From infancy, people are bombarded with distractions that can make that challenging. While there is a wealth of cognitive […]
Taking Control of Your Brain Activity: New Neurofeedback Results
Summer is coming to an end, but imagine if your fun summer vacation experiences could later help you in addressing neuropsychological conditions. That’s a concept that inspires and motivates David Mehler, an MD/PhD student and cognitive neuroscientist at Cardiff University. “Imagine seeing a thermometer gauge that shows how strongly a specific part of your brain […]
The Centrality of Character to Storytelling in the Brain
While binge watching a new show, I sometimes wonder what’s keeping me watching even when the plot, well, falls apart. Usually, it has to do with the characters; watching them show after show makes it hard to separate from them even when the plot is no longer engaging. A new study about narrative storytelling might […]
A Dynamic Approach to Understanding Age-Related Memory Decline
Matthew Costello has been studying how aging affects cognition and perception for close to 10 years. But answers to the questions of exactly how and why visual working memory declines in older adults have still eluded him and other researchers. Now, he is taking an information processing approach to this topic that affects so many […]
