A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Tom Wolfe: his 1996 predictions foreshadowed dubious media stories of neural circuits for infidelity and political orientation. Photograph: Jim Cooper/AP Perhaps Wolfe’s most astute observation was cultural: how the collapse of Freud and Marx had pushed people into using the language of cognitive science for explanations of human behaviour. He also noticed that [...]
Interdiscplinarity forces us to think in new ways. Photograph: Helen Pynor/GV Art Due to its incredible complexity, the brain is an immensely challenging subject of study. The average human brain has about 90 billion neurons that make 100 trillion connections or synapses. Scientists believe this staggering number of neurons is responsible for the [...]
Computer artwork of a brain-shaped network of lines and connections. Photo: Alfred Pasieka/Science Photo Library/Corbis Back in the 1980s, the American scientist Benjamin Libet made a surprising discovery that appeared to rock the foundations of what it means to be human. He recorded people’s brain waves as they made spontaneous finger movements while [...]
We don't have individual "learning styles." (Reuters/ Mohamad Torokman) Are you a visual learner who writes notes in a rainbow of different colors, or do you have to read something aloud before it will sink it? Chances are, you’ve been asked a similar question at some point in your life, and believe the [...]
Can new research into neuroscience unlock how learning takes place? Photograph: Ben Edwards/Getty Image No one knows how much knowledge students take home with them after a day at school. Tests, homework and inspections give a snapshot of learning but ultimately it’s something that you cannot see; it’s invisible and personal. The educational [...]
istockphoto Traditional Eastern medicine has long acknowledged the importance of the gut. But evidence-based medicine, colloquially called Western medicine despite being practiced all over the world, has long disregarded a possible link between the brain and the gut – until recently, because a paradigm shift in neuroscience is now taking place. - Sara [...]
dailymail A recent neurology study found that the more porn a man watched, the less gray matter he had in his brain. The study made headlines the world over, prompting an anonymous listener to ask whether such sexual stimulation is indeed bad for the brain. So just what is the effect of sexual [...]
gettyimages Most of the anorexia patients Dr. Joanna Steinglass sees in the inpatient eating-disorders unit at the New York State Psychiatric Institute have been to treatment before. While in the hospital or a residential treatment center, they generally gained weight and began to eat a wider variety of foods. But after they left, [...]
Shutterstock You have fewer synapses in your brain now than a 2-year-old. That may sound like an insult, but it’s a scientific fact. We’re all born with heads full of lonely, isolated neurons. But as our baby brains are inundated with sensory information over the first two years of life, those neurons rapidly [...]
Credit: Bruce Conner If you assume that you understand why you think and act the way you do, you’re probably wrong. Decades of psychological research suggest that people behave in ways that are mysterious and perplexing — even to themselves. We sifted through the Quora thread, “What are some mind-blowing facts about social [...]
