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There's only one place in the world where you can view row after row of brains afflicted by mad cow disease, Alzheimer's, and alcoholism. It's Lima's Museo de Cerebros, home to the largest collection of gray matter that can be viewed by the public. More »
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Brain size can vary tremendously between species. For instance, the average human head holds around three pounds of cerebral matter; your typical chimp, on the other hand, packs about a third of that. More »
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Scientists this week published a study that reveals what the human brain looks like under the influence of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical found in magic mushrooms. More »
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When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with the Visible Human Project. The idea that a person could be frozen solid and subsequently sliced from head-to-toe, one-third of a millimeter at a time (a process known as cryosectioning) was almost too incredible for my adolescent brain to handle. More »
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The two halves of the brain are connected through a bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. There are times when that bundle of fibers is cut, either through injury or surgery. Often, these cuts result in little noticeable change. Other times, they force people into pitched battle against their other selves. More »
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In an effort to test the plasticity of the brain, scientists a decade ago decided to scramble a ferret's brain so that its eyes were hooked up to its auditory cortex. So clearly the ferret was blind, right? Wrong. Find out about the experiment that lead scientists to understand exactly how adaptable our brains can be. More »
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RM had his first out-of-body experience at the age of 16. Now, at the age of 55, he has had more than he can count. They usually happen just before he falls asleep; for ten minutes, he feels like he is floating above his body, looking down on himself. If the same thing happens when he's awake, it's a far less tranquil story. The sense of displacement is stronger – his real body feels like a marionette, while he feels like a puppeteer. His feelings of elevation soon change into religious delusions, in which he imagines himself talking to angels and demons. Psychotic episodes follow. After four or five days, RM is hospitalised. More »
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We all know that electromagnetic fields are magic and can do anything at any time for any reason. Sometimes, though, they can be harnessed to do certain things in particular. Electromagnetic fields can be applied to the skull, making your brain do strange, and sometimes completely inexplicable things. Find out how scientists use magnetic fields to rip your mind apart, make it better, and have it do tricks like a trained puppy. More »
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In a paper doubtless to be horribly misconstrued by much of the media (sample headline: Facebook linked to big brains), a new research paper has found a link between the size of your Facebook friend network, and the density of certain areas of the brain. More »
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Ah, the intelligence quotient—the number everyone pretends not to care about but secretly does. For years, we've assumed that a person's IQ score—commonly used to assess one's general intellectual capacity and make predictions on everything from educational achievement to employment prospects—remained relatively constant over his or her lifetime. More »
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There are many things that set us apart from our primate cousins, but the biggest (literally) is our brains. Our oversized minds have let us carve out a unique evolutionary path, and it's all thanks to a single replicated gene. More »
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You may love stories about the end of the world, but that's probably because, deep down, you don't believe it could ever happen. But that's not because you're realistic. It's actually a quirk of the human brain, recently explored by a group of neuroscientists, which prevents us from adjusting our expectations about the future — even if there's good evidence that bad things are about to happen. More »
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A healthy, 54-year-old woman living in the Washington, D.C. area awoke one morning to find that she couldn't remember what she was doing. She knew who and where she was, but couldn't seem to form new memories. After a day of confusion and forgetfulness, she went to the Georgetown University Hospital. There, she admitted that the memory losses began right after having sex with her husband. More »
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Anyone ever told you that if you don't get your vitamins, your brain will shrink? No? Well they should. It turns out that having a vitamin B12 deficiency later in life is pretty bad for your grey matter. A group of researchers looked at over-65s from the South Side of Chicago, and measured the amount of vitamin B12 and B12-related metabolites in their blood, their cognitive skills, and took MRIs of them. More »
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As part of a series on the science of sex at New York's incredible World Science Festival, neuroscientist Jim Pfaus talked about how clitoral stimulation affects women's brains. And he notes that the same structures exist in rat brains — indicating that clitoral sexual response is probably an ancient development in animal brains, predating the development of humans by a long shot. More »
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While the tongue map may have been thoroughly debunked, what about our brains? Does each kind of flavor get processed in its own little corner of our grey matter? According to new research, they just might. More »
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A simple optical illusion, called the motion quartet, reveals impressive things about how the brain works in general, and the particular link ups of individual brains. Find out whether your cerebral hemispheres are firmly linked! More »
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Einstein's brain was saved after his death, and became a strange and morbid piece of scientific memorabilia. It changed hands several times before it came to rest - squared. More »
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Over the weekend, a sixteen-year-old girl lost her life to a rare infection from an amoeba called Naegleria fowleri, which eats neurons in the brain (in the image here, you can see the amoeba eating rat neurons). Most likely she caught it while swimming in a river near her Florida home. Experts say the Naegleria fowleri ameoba is most likely to breed during the summer months in the South, but infections are so rare that people are unlikely to know when they see an infection. More »
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It's possible that depression could be cured by reducing mild swelling in your brain. Neuroscientists have linked depression to brain inflammation before, and now a new study suggests further evidence for this theory. Here you can see the distinctive signature of a glial cell responding to swollen tissue in a brain — the cell's center is elongated, and it has many more branching fibers than a typical glial cell. More »
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According to data collected by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, August is the most dangerous month of the year to be a U.S. motorist. But here's some promising news for the future: researchers have created a device that allows people to control their brakes just by thinking about it. In The Journal of Neural Engineering, scientists offer evidence that "mind-reading" technologies can help you slam on the brakes at the speed of thought, and avoid accidents. More »
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It's paint-by-numbers for neuroscientists. At the Max-Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, Germany, researchers have devised a faster way of computing the neural connections that make up the brain. Mapping out this intricate web previously depended on the human eye as no computer was powerful enough to handle the brain's complex network of 70 billion neurons and thousands of kilometres of circuits. For this gargantuan task, even the smallest sliver of neural tissue was painstaking, demanding an experienced team to make modest progress. More »
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Rehab isn't a reliable way of getting off drugs, so neuroscientists are investigating ways to create drugs that will prevent you from getting high in the first place. Now a new discovery promises to make your brain totally immune to the effects of cocaine. More »
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Every day, we look for ways to be happy. We do terrible things, or seek great achievement, or search for true love, or sometimes take on deep spiritual quests. Because happiness can be found within — literally. Your body provides itself with many chemicals that make you happy for no good reason. Take a look at all the ways that you live better through brain chemistry. More »
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A group of scientists did an experiment where they were actually able to see the process of memories being rewritten in a person's brain — as a result of peer pressure. More »
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The Buffalo Theory is a popular urban legend which holds that the neuron-nerfing quality of alcohol can boost your intelligence. The basic idea is as follows: by targeting the weakest of your brain cells, alcohol actually aids in a process of natural selection, improving the overall performance of your brain by picking off the weakest members of its neuronal herds. Now, research published in today's issue of Neuron has shown that the driving concept behind this specious hypothesis is actually more or less correct. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5812892&view=rss&microfeed=true Researchers have developed a brain implant that augments the brain capacity of rats, boosting their ability to recall tasks. Reports Benedict Carey in the New York Times: More »
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Now we know why people have been dosing themselves with the animal tranquillizer ketamine for years. Scientists have learned that ketamine, known to the experimental among you as Special K, is a powerful, fast-acting antidepressant. More »
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Upon seeing this video, anaesthesiologist Professor Brian Pollard from Manchester Royal Infirmary told BBC reporter Jennifer Carpenter: "Our jaws just hit the ground. I can't tell you the words we used as it wouldn't be polite over the phone." More »
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Vision and hearing are generally regarded as two very different senses. Unless, of course, you can echolocate. Now, scientists have revealed for the first time that human echolocators — blind individuals who navigate their surroundings by producing mouth clicks and listening to the returning echoes — actually process these sounds in the regions of the brain dedicated to interpreting visual stimuli. More »
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Scientists have known for a while that every time you retrieve a memory, you rewrite it. Remembering something is to change it, and with the help of drugs it can be changed a lot. That's the focus of research from the University of Montreal, where researchers discovered that when men who took a drug called metyrapone while remembering something painful, they couldn't recall the bad parts of the memory four days later. More »
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It's long been established that the mighty brain is nothing but a mound of putty. We don't see what we think we do, we don't remember what we think we do, and we don't like what we think we do. If we did, advertisers would be out of business. As it is, they're literally putting false thoughts inside our heads. More »
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There are grizzled heroes and sleek assassins in movies who don't have metaphorical blind spots. They do have literal ones, though. Because of the way the eye is constructed, every human being does. More »
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When you hear nasty gossip about somebody, it changes the way your brain responds to that person's face. A new study reveals that, given a choice, people will stare longer at the faces of people they've heard bad things about. More »
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190 million years ago, there were no mammals on Earth. Instead, there were furry, mouse-like creatures no bigger than a paperclip. And they suddenly began to grow brains 10 times larger than their relative body size. What happened? More »
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Autism takes a heavy toll on families — autistic teens are more likely to be bullied, and families with autistic kids are likelier to have lower incomes. But now at last, we're starting to learn more about what causes autism. More »
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Spotting Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) at an early age is invaluable for treatment. The first symptoms of the disorder usually manifest when children are two, and there is often a significant delay between when parents spot the signs and when they tell their doctor. But a new paper published in the Journal of Pediatrics proposes a simple, five-minute checklist that parents could run through with their one-year-olds, to identify ASD early. More »
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When you're really tired, your brain deals with the problem by putting parts of itself to sleep. Scientists say partially-asleep brains could explain everything from sleepwalking and talking, to why you make so many mistakes when you're exhausted. More »
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Neurologist Jacopo Annese's brain donors already include a woman who played one of the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, and a woman who can't feel fear. But he wants the brain of Donald Trump as well. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5794881&view=rss&microfeed=true Young adults who were abused as children share a similar neuroendocrinal trait. When they confront ordinary situations of stress, like taking a test, their brains are flooded with abnormally high levels of the hormone cortisol. According to Queens University psychology professor Karen Harkness: More »
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