While an undergraduate chemistry major at Caltech, David Van Essen read The Machinery of the Brain by Dean Woolridge. Published in 1963, the book gives an engineer’s perspective of the biological foundation of brain function, likening it to a computer. “That immediately hooked me on neuroscience, and I never looked […]
Implicit bias, plasticity, and language were front and center in the most popular CNS stories of 2016. From using neuroscience findings to help understand and reduce bias to exploring why some people learn a second language more easily than others to recent debates over neuroimaging techniques, cognitive neuroscientists continue to […]
Go for a trolley ride, visit Alcatraz, and take in world-class cognitive science talks when you visit San Francisco for CNS 2017. From March 25-28, 2017, more than 1,500 cognitive neuroscientists will gather to discuss the latest research on memory, language, aging, learning, and more in 50 talks and more than […]
Outside of superintelligence thrillers like Lucy or Limitless, it’s rare to have a popular Hollywood blockbuster explore a sliver of cognitive neuroscience. Even rarer is for that sliver to involve language science, which is why I was thrilled to see linguistics front and center in Arrival. Aside from it being […]
Cranberry sauce is perhaps a non-obvious star of the Thanksgiving dinner table. With its rich red color – whether homemade or from the can – the holiday favorite is actually part of the hardwiring in our brain: A new study finds that people favor red-colored foods over green ones, and […]
Not a day goes by, it seems, without some reminder of how important sleep is for our brain health – whether a headline about the dangers of cell phone use before bed or the latest start-up encouraging its workers to nap during the day. While we are all increasingly aware […]
While recently binge watching Game of Thrones, I frequently found myself reacting to particularly graphic scenes of violence as though I were about to directly experience those horrors. We have all had moments when we physically feel like we can feel the pain of others. But some experiences can feel […]
Guest Post by David Mehler, Cardiff University and University of Münster Are fMRI studies valid? That is a question that has been posited across the news media the past month – including most recently in the New York Times – in the wake of a new study by Anders Eklund […]
Guest Post by Angela Grant, Pennsylvania State University Do you remember the last time you took a language course? No matter if it was online or classroom based, immersive or translation focused, I would be willing to bet a large sum of money that your language abilities when you left […]
Imagine trying to read a word – even this very sentence – and the letters all looking like a jumbled mess. You can see letters but they no longer make sense. This recently happened to patients who were in a unique study to investigate the origins of reading in the […]
March 29–April 1 | 2025
