It's another blow for immersive virtual reality. University of California researchers have shown that even people with perfect eyesight navigate the world by relying on a lot more than what they see. Here's why VR won't really work until we go beyond visual cues
They once were blind but now they see. Which begs the question — what exactly do people see when they gain sight for the first time? Often, it's terrifying.
Why can't you think straight when you're terrified? It's a question that haunted many people in the wake of yesterday's explosions in Boston, and neuroscience journalist Maia Szalavitz explains the answer to you over at Time.
Meditation yields a surprising number of health benefits, including stress reduction, improved attention, better memory, and even increased creativity and feelings of compassion. But how can something as simple as focusing on a single object produce such dramatic results? Here’s what the growing body of scientific…
It was starting to get so bad for Ontario's Kim Rollins that her mother started to make plans for the funeral. Conventional therapies weren't helping to alleviate her severe anorexia, so Rollins decided to volunteer for a cutting-edge treatment: deep-brain stimulation. Now, with her "brain pacemaker," she has been…
Over at Discover, Carl Zimmer tackles a question that many of us are wondering about during flu season. Why do our brains get sluggish when we're sick? It turns out that a neuroscientist named Jonathan Kipnis is working on an answer. He studies how T cells, major players in our immune system, collect in the lining…
Cognitive scientists have yet to create a functional, working model of the human brain. Our computers are way too slow, and our understanding of the brain is way too primitive. But that doesn't mean we can't create a model of the functioning brain at a much smaller scale. And in fact, this is exactly what a group of …
The eye is just a pinhole that leaks light onto a bunch of reactive cells. It's the brain that "sees" things. And if something goes wrong in the brain, all kinds of things can appear distorted. But one particular crossed wire brings moving objects to a standstill. It's called akinetopsia.
When it comes to making decisions on the fly, we sacrifice accuracy for speed. It's true for humans, and it's true for most other species — rapid fire answers are less likely to be correct. Called the speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT), and while we know it's a thing, the scientific basis for it has been poorly understood.…
Despite having spent late nights ruminating over stupid things you've said, it is actually possible to make yourself forget bad memories. In fact, not only is it possible, but the brain actually has two very different systems for doing it.
