Stories by David Dobbs

Betting on Consciousness: Ancient Question Meets Ancient Game

Welcome to the seventh installment of

Mind Matters Mind Matters is Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain.

Closing the Racial Achievement Gap

Welcome to the fifth installment of Mind Matters Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain. Each week, top researchers describe their disciplines' most significant new findings -- and what they, as fellow researchers, find most exciting, maddening, significant, odd, or otherwise noteworthy in the research driving their fields...

Paths to Enrichment: Better Digs & Fatherhood Enrich the Brain

Welcome to the fourth installment of

Mind Matters Mind Matters is Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain.

Big Decision: Head or Gut? Hmm ...

This week's paper is On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect by Ap Dijksterhuis, Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren and Rick B.

Good Sex Is Not a Rat Race

The Costs of War: A Study Reignites the Debate Over Soldiers' Trauma

David Dobbs, our regular Mind Matters columnist, is taking advantage of the balmy weather to get some much-needed R&R. So we dug up one of the very first Mind Matters columns on account of it being newly topical.....

Through the Grid, a Window on Cognition

by A. David Redish, Ph.D. University of Minnesota Commentary on Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex," by Torkel Hafting, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I...

Grid Cells: Putting Rats in Their Places and (Maybe) Meaning in Life

Welcome to Mind Matters. Below, in an enthralling pair of posts about how neural mechanisms of navigation may also underlie memory and cognition, neuroscientists James J...

Controlling Cellular Gates Curbs Damage after Strokes

Brain Relies on Stepwise Activation to Make Difficult Decisions

Sex Drive Stays in Gear with Antidepressant Bupropion

Turning Off Depression

Helen Mayberg may have found the switch that lifts depression--and shined a light on the real link between thought and emotion

A Revealing Reflection

Mirror neurons are providing stunning insights into everything from how we learn to walk to how we empathize with others

Weak Nerves May Cause Depression

Mastery of Emotions

Joseph E. LeDoux discovered how fear arises. Now he is showing that the biology of emotions is what gives life meaning

A Pacemaker for Depression

Big Answers from Little People

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

The Quest of Christof Koch

For this mountain-climbing neuroscientist, explaining consciousness is the ultimate extreme sport

Fact or Phrenology?

The growing controversy over fMRI scans is forcing us to confront whether brain equals mind

Zen Gamma