Stories by Stephen L. Macknik

How do we fool thee?
Let us count the ways that illusions play with our hearts and minds

Pain is an emotion

How tricking the eye reveals the inner workings of the brain

Street artists use the city as their canvas

Some people believe that will power is a bodily function that requires glucose to power it. Carol Dweck's new paper shows that its not so.

Pain is an emotion

When the substantia nigra is super charged by food restriction, or drugs, or both, you become super motivated to seek out more food, or more drugs… whatever floats the substantia nigra’s boat.

Lack of clarity about how the world works is implicated in delusions, along with overly strong—stubborn—beliefs that sculpt perceptual data into conformity.

I love Tse’s book. It has literally set me free.

Crux (Angry Robot Books) is an outstanding speculative fiction adventure. It combines the very highest level of neuroscientific reality with plausible neuroscience fiction that is very well thought through.

Our new column in Scientific American Mind is out today and it's about the illusory nature of pain, and how pain perception and severity varies with mood and circumstances.

A study in the journal Neurosurgical Focus has calculated thate DBS will have to be 83% effective in order for it to be a better choice than gastric bypass for obese patients.

An important and exciting piece of research just came out in Science Magazine last week showing why gastric bypass surgery has such powerful curative effects on diabetes, beyond the previous belief that the dietary restriction helps diabetes.

A new review of the scientific literature studying hypnosis, in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, by Oakley and Halligan, discusses the potential for hypnosis to provide insights into brain mechanisms involved in attention, motor control, pain perception, beliefs and volition and also to produce informative analogues of clinical conditions.

Fading illusions play hide-and-seek with your perception