Mind's Eye

Unwinding the Movie Reels in the Mind’s Eye

November 9, 2017

I can see it all in my mind like a mini-movie: my family and I eating breakfast at the kitchen table, pouring cereal, drinking juice and coffee, and chatting. The body positioning, senses, and actions are all vividly recreated in my mind’s eye. We all do it to some extent […]

Enhancing the Sleeping Brain

October 17, 2017

Guest Post by Sadie (Sarah) Witkowski, Northwestern University As one of five children, my mom has plenty of stories about her and her siblings’ misadventures. One of my favorites revolves around my “weird” Uncle Dorsey and his early scientific endeavors. When my mom was about 8 years old, her older brother […]

stress learning

The Effects of Stress on Learning Vary by Memory Type

September 28, 2017

The other day, I reset my password for a social media site. When I went to login today, I inadvertently entered the old password. When that happened, I was using my automatic, “stimulus-response” memory, a rigid, habit-like memory. When I then remembered I had changed my password, I tapped into […]

Open Letter on New NIH Clinical Trials Policy

September 6, 2017

The Cognitive Neuroscience Society is adding its voice questioning the new policy that NIH has adopted that fails to distinguish between basic research and clinical trials.  As a result of this policy, a wide array of basic research studies will be required to register as clinical trials starting in January […]

social reasoning

Assessing Social Reasoning in Adolescence

August 8, 2017

Every day, we compare ourselves to others, both in person and increasingly online. Am I smarter than my friend? Am I nicer or friendlier? Such judgments require a type of “social reasoning” – first rating yourself and your friends and then making a comparison. Among adolescents, this type of thinking […]

language memory

Linking Words and Memories: How We Remember the Structure of Things

July 11, 2017

Speaking at the Big Ideas in Neuroscience session at the recent CNS annual meeting, Angela Friederici of the Max Planck Institute discussed language as a unique human trait. Understanding of the words we use comes from different types of memories in different networks the brain. Neuroscientists often gain insight into […]

neuroarchitecture

Buildings, Beauty, and the Brain: Q&A with Anjan Chatterjee

June 15, 2017

We all know intuitively that place shapes our everyday experiences. From the colors of the walls to the amount of light in the room, how we design buildings affects how we think, feel, and behave. A growing body of research is examining how architectural design affects us on the neural […]

reality

Sorting Out What is Real: Q&A with Jon Simons

May 24, 2017

At the CNS meeting last March in San Francisco, I learned a new term during Marcia Johnson’s Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award lecture: reality monitoring. Coined by Johnson, reality monitoring refers to how we distinguish what is real from what is imagined in our everyday lives. For some people, having […]

channel surfing

Your Brain on Channel Surfing

May 16, 2017

It’s Sunday morning and I am looking through tweets while watching the news. With smartphones now ubiquitous, such situation are increasingly common: taking in information with multiple interruptions, often by choice. In a new study, researchers studied this phenomenon on the neural level by having people watch movie clips in […]

Prioritizing Gestures in Communication

May 1, 2017

The very first way babies communicate is through gestures (well, in addition to crying, that is). They may express “I want that” as a distinct pointing toward an object. As people grow older, gestures are not abandoned, but both spoken and body language become more ambiguous. Oftentimes, adults will point […]

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