Mind & Brain
Is Pain a Construct of the Mind?
Pain is an emotion
Stories by Stephen L. Macknik
Sight and Sound: An Evening with John Williams and Steven Spielberg
We’re sitting in the front row of the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra, listening to the musicians warm up for the dress rehearsal of tonight’s benefit concert starring John Williams, his movie music, and guest starring Steven Spielberg...
Join Us At The Gonda Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University in Tel-Aviv
For those of you who are in Israel today or tomorrow, come join us at The Gonda Center for free presentations on illusions and visual perception.
Behavior
Fat Tuesday: Believe in Will Power, and You Shall Have It
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.
Fat Tuesday: Feed the Addict
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...
Feeling Persecuted? You May Be Delusional.
Lack of clarity about how the world works is implicated in delusions, along with overly strong—stubborn—beliefs that sculpt perceptual data into conformity.
The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation by Peter Ulric Tse (MIT Press, 2013)
I love Tse’s book. It has literally set me free.
Mind & Brain
Neuroscience in Fiction: Crux, by Ramez Naam
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...
Mind & Brain
Pain is an emotion
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.
Mind & Brain
Fat Tuesday: Neurosurgery versus bariatric surgery in obesity
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.
Illusory Scenes Fade into and out of View
Fading illusions play hide-and-seek with your perception
Mind & Brain
Fat Tuesday: Surgery for everyone! How science validated the gastric bypass.
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...
Mind & Brain
The Neural Magic of Hypnotic Suggestion
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...
Mind & Brain
Fat Tuesday: Even if you eat a healthy diet, your genes can make you fat
Credit: Boston Children's Hospital. Three sibling mice. The one on the left has a genetic defect that causes it to grow fat even though it was given the same diet.
Mind & Brain
Happy Birthday PeerJ!
Tomorrow marks the anniversary of the paradigm-shifting new journal, PeerJ . It used to be that to read about science, even science paid for by tax payers, you had to pay expensive subscription fees...
Mind & Brain
Neuroscience in Fiction: Fear and panic in Jaden and Will Smith s After Earth
“You must realize that fear is not real. It is a product of thoughts you create. Do not misunderstand me. Danger is very real. But fear is a choice.” ― Will Smith as General Cypher Raige in After Earth Just in time for Father’s Day weekend, the father-and-son duo Will and Jaden Smith costar in the new filial love epic/sci-fi adventure After Earth...
Mind & Brain
Join a Think Tank in NYC!
The Think Tank is a mobile cognitive science lab and education station that will harness intrinsic interest in the human brain and mind to get disadvantaged and STEM-underrepresented kids hooked on science...
Mind & Brain
NeuroSCIence in FIction: Kill Decision
From the Sleights of Mind archives. Every Friday we discuss how neuroscience is portrayed in fiction. This week we’ll be discussing Daniel Suarez’s new book, Kill Decision.
Mind & Brain
Illusion of the week: It Kind Of Looks Like a Building
The New York Daily News sums up this story better than I can: Apparently, after thinking long and hard, the mouthpiece for China's Communist Party was cocksure that the erection of a new headquarters would be warmly received — but they blew it. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/chinese-newspaper-headquarters-stuns-article-1.1339284#ixzz2U5CcJMVJ...
Mind & Brain
Fat Tuesday: Hungry for love
From the archives at Sleights of Mind. By Evan-Amos (Own work), via Wikimedia Commons Neurons are brain cells and they are similar to the other cells of the body in most every way, except that they reach for each other and pass little messages between themselves...
