Stories by David Dobbs

Big Answers from Little People

In infants, Elizabeth Spelke finds fundamental insights into how men and women think

Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD

A growing number of experts insist that the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered and that soldiers are suffering as a result

MIND Reviews: Obsession: A History

Reviews and recommendations from the December 2008/January 2009 issue of Scientific American MIND

DVDs: Comic Conversion

Mind Reviews Books, Movies and More

Reviews and recommendations from the June/July 2008 issue of Scientific American MIND

The Lab Route to Out-of-Body Experiences

by Susana Martinez-Conde, PhD
Director, Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience
Barrow Neurological institute
Phoenix, Arizona




Some camera work, some stroking, and next thing you know you're out of your own body...

Selective Vision: The Brain's Spin Machine Starts Early

Welcome to

Mind Matters With the election season hard upon us and the spin machines working overtime, we thought it sensible to rerun a post from last year about a sort of spin machine recently discovered in the brain...

A Tour of NeuroSci - Mind Matters' First Year

Mind Matters - The First Year We did not, alas, make it to the Prague Museum, which is pictured above. But with the end of both the calendar year and Mind Matters' first year it seems a good time to look a back and see where we have been since launching in January...

Mirror Neurons -- Rock Stars or Backup Singers?

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Greg Hickok Center for Cognitive Neuroscience University of California, Irvine Mirror neurons are the rock stars of cognitive neuroscience...

Sleep, Attention, and Memory: Not (Maybe) What You Thought

by Robert Stickgold

Harvard Medical School



Most of us can remember at least one occasion on which we sat in class, half asleep, trying to pay attention and learn what we were being taught "“ to no avail...

The Choke Factor: How Stereotypes Affect Performance

_____________________ How Stereotypes Shape Performance S. Alexander Haslam, Jessica Salvatore, and Thomas Kessler
University of Exeter, UK Every sports fan has vivid memories of key occasions on which a favorite team or player has 'choked' under pressure...

How Babies Know What You're Up To (or Not)

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How Infants Predict Other People's Behavior Valerie Kuhlmeier and Tania Tzelnic
Queen's University, Kingston, ON 
When it comes to watching the actions of others, we all have a little Nostradamus in us...

When Every Face is Like Another

Toward a Neurofunctional Definition of "Face-Blindness"
Alison M. Harris & Geoffrey K. Aguirre University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA In 1947 Dr.

The Green Space Cure: The Psychological Value of Biodiversity

Welcome to

Mind Matters where top researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry explain and discuss the findings and theories driving their fields.

Amusing pain, elevating music, and other jewels from the Society for Neuroscience meeting

Welcome to Mind Matters
where top researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry explain and discuss the findings and theories driving their fields. 
Readers can join them...

Not-so-deliberate: The decisive power of what you don't know you know

Welcome to

Mind Matters where top researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry explain and discuss the findings and theories driving their fields.

Dog tails as tell-tales: Or how a dog solves the mind-body problem and shows us to be monkeys

_____________________ Dog Tails as Tell-Tales: The Evolution of Brain-Hemisphere Specialization Peter F. MacNeilageUniversity of Texas at AustinA dog earns its reputation as best friend in part because it wags its tail in joy at the sight of its owner...

Attention! How your brain manages its need to heed

Welcome to

Mind Matters where top researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry explain and discuss the findings and theories driving their fields.

Can nurture save you from your own genes? Genes, environment and depression

Welcome to Mind Matterswhere top researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry explain and discuss the findings and theories driving their fields.

Eric Kandel: From Mind to Brain and Back Again

Awarded the Nobel Prize for work 40 years ago that revealed memory's most basic mechanisms, this psychiatrist-turned-neuroscientist is still working his discipline's cutting edge