Stress

So yesterday, I adopted an unborn land-mine-detecting African giant pouched rat (Cricetomys gambianus) from Tanzania. Did I spend 20 minutes figuring out what I was going to call it, as one of my many privileges as an adoptive parent?

Editor's note: This is the first installment in a series about emerging neurotechnologies. Join a pilot class of 12 PhD students at MIT as we explore how neuroscience is revolutionizing our understanding of the brain.

Plato once noted that “creativity is a divine madness, a gift from gods." Romantic notions of the link between mental illness and creativity still appear prominently in popular culture.

Just when it seems there's a mobile app for just about everything, psychologists have shown there's room for one more: they are using smartphones to help them better understand the dynamics of moral and immoral behavior out in the community.

As many as 20 percent of war veterans return from combat in Afghanistan and Iraq with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or major depression, according to a 2008 report from the RAND Corporation.

Managing editor Sandra Upson introduces the September/October 2014 issue of Scientific American MIND

The new identification of possible genetic markers for post-traumatic stress disorder supports treatment with a steroid hormone a few hours after trauma

A good friend of mine passed away in June. John had cancer. Before you offer condolences, you should know he did not want to be mourned. It’s been a hard request to follow, but he felt he had lived a full life.

When I was kid, I remember my dad scolding my brother and me when one of us decided to hold the other one upside-down. In that position, he reasoned, we could fall on our head.

In my perfect world, artist-in-residence is just the beginning. In my perfect world, all researchers and research institutions are paired with a comedian-in-residence.

Harmful chemicals, stress and other influences can permanently alter which genes are turned on without changing any of the genes' code. Now, it appears, some of these “epigenetic” changes are passed down to—and may cause disease in— future generations

How do I knock off thirty years from my age? Faust, the protagonist in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's famous play, poses this question to Mephistopheles in the chapter Hexenküche (Witches' kitchen).