Even among the healthiest people, aging takes a toll on the brain – changing and often decreasing our cognitive capabilities. Science fiction writers have long imagined ways to maintain and enhance cognition in the face of aging, disease, or otherwise. Increasingly, scientists are investigating ways to make that happen. One […]
After taking my kids to see Moana recently, I was struck by how differently they relayed the story to their dad than I did – different parts stood out to them as being especially funny or scary, and they used very different words to describe the plot and characters. Thus, […]
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 […]
March 29–April 1 | 2025
