Going Mental

The concept of trust is in many ways the connective tissue of society—governing everything from our personal relationships to our common use of currency. Most, if not all, of the decisions we make every day rely on one form or another of trust. But what if our capacity for faith is simply the result ... Read More

In 2006, filmmaker David Lynch—a poet of the sublimely bizarre and the surreally normal—wrote a book on transcendental meditation. Describing his experience, he writes: "It takes you to an ocean of pure consciousness, pure knowingness. But it's familiar; it's you. And right away a sense of happiness ... Read More

As leading-edge neuroimaging labs use scanners to reveal more and more details about how the brain works, their findings are increasingly affecting other fields as well. The legal system, in particular, is now being forced to assess the potential implications of new information about how issues ... Read More

Computers have seem "mind-like" to people since they were invented in 1950s. In the early days they were widely called "electronic brains" for their ability to process information. But the similarity between computers and brains isn't just superficial: at their most fundamental levels, computers and ... Read More

As human brains age, they lose their ability to recall memories. Our memory peaks at the age of 30, and then it declines gradually with time. So it's not surprising when older people begin to forget small things—like where they put their car keys or glasses. Princeton neuroscientist Sam Wang says ... Read More

The narrative of personal improvement is as American as baseball—almost as American as a fondness for illegal and prescription drugs. From steroids and human growth hormones on the baseball diamond to amphetamines in college libraries and quadrangles, performance enhancing drugs combine a desire for ... Read More

Now that the Internet and the devices through which we connect to it have made ever-increasing amounts of information available to us all the time, scientists and social philosophers have begun to wonder whether our neural pathways can sustain the panoply of distractions that this information glut ... Read More

So you're at a cocktail party, and, like at most cocktail parties, there are a handful of conversations happening around the room. Yet, despite the dull roar of laughter and discussion, you have no trouble focusing on the voice of the person with whom you're speaking. You see her eyes and lips ... Read More

Emotions are messy, complicated phenomena—not just for lovers, but for neuroscientists as well, because they combine cognition with physiology. Scientists once thought of emotion as a purely mental activity which elicited bodily responses, but they now see the mind and body as equally responsible ... Read More

Memory is one of the cornerstones of what it means to be human. Recording aspects of the world around us and storing them in our brains for future recall is vital to nearly all advanced human functions. It makes us who we are, and helps us to make sense of reality. But what is really happening in ... Read More

Confidence is a trait typically cast as a higher-order function in the brain. It’s at once the act of making a decision, recognizing the decision as thought, and measuring the degree to which that decision makes sense. An impartial judge it’s not, prophet even less, yet confidence surely requires ... Read More

In the field of neuroscience, we know far less about language than about other brain mechanisms like emotion, memory, or sensation. The inherent difficulty of studying language is that it is so closely linked to thought. There are certainly parts of the brain in which language is concentrated, but ... Read More

Not long ago, scientists thought of the brain as being "hard-wired." Neural networks are formed at a young age and remain inflexible throughout the rest of one's lifetime, they believed. But one of the great discoveries of recent decades is that the brain remains highly adaptable, or plastic, even ... Read More

There are precious few love songs that mention the brain, which is unfortunate because the brain, according to research by biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, is at the heart of love. According to Fisher there are three components to love. The first is lust, or the craving for sexual ... Read More

It is a cliché that the brain is the "largest sex organ," but the repetition of the phrase doesn't make it any less true. The mechanics of its role during sex are less obvious and less well understood than that of the body's other sex organs, but by using brain imaging scans, neuroscientists have ... Read More