Ed. note: This week, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring a 5-part series about the neuroscience of love and romance. At the end, we’ll put the full series on our website. Enjoy! Does all this romantic mumbo-jumbo make you feel a little queasy? I have good news: a recent study showed that listening…
Harvard Scientists have developed new ways to look inside the brain, and the results are stunning.
A new study in ballerinas has found that practicing pirouettes can change the structure of the brain to prevent dizziness and improve balance. Scientists from Imperial College London hope that this finding will lead to new treatments for people who suffer from chronic dizziness. The researchers scanned the brains of ballerinas spinning in a chair…
Scientists have long known that sleep is crucial for forming memories, but now they have evidence that taking breaks from learning–even while you’re awake–can help consolidate memories and “tune in” to what you have just learned. In a recent study published in Neuron, NYU researchers found that the subjects who took a break from learning retained more…
Do you remember the futuristic movie Minority Report? In the movie, Tom Cruise’s character works in the Police’s departments of “pre-crime” and goes around arresting people before they commit the actual crime. A new study has come eerily close to the science fiction described in Minority Report, finding that brain scans can quite accurately predict…
It’s common wisdom that women become emotionally unhinged when it’s their “time of the month,” right? Supposedly, we get weepy, angry, and just generally difficult whenever our periods come along. Is it true? For some women, sure, at least on occasion. Others aren’t as affected. This emotional instability has long been associated with hormonal changes…
Last week I started discussing the social implications as they relate issues of neuroimaging and gender. If you haven’t read that article, you can access it here for the background and introduction to this topic. Here’s another example of the neuroscience of gender at work: As of 2009, an estimated 360 public schools in the…
Lately, I’ve read about quite a few interesting brain imaging studies, on all sorts of topics. Collectively, these have sparked my curiosity about this question: how might brain imaging technology transform our culture far beyond its medical applications? While many of the possibilities are exciting, others make me nervous–especially those that threaten hard-won equalities by…
As someone with a deep interest in music, I’ve often wondered about that age-old question: where does music come from? It’s become a cliché for musicians to wax philosophical about how their creative impulses come from “deep within” or that improvisation is a way of expressing their “true self”, but good luck getting anything more…
All week I’ve been posting a favorite brain-related TED video each day. This is the last TED talk I’ll post for now- I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed them and learned from watching them. We’ll be sure to check the videos for TED 2010, which just concluded, and post any interesting neuroscience-related ones we find. Since…
