Consciousness: Signals in the Noise
StartFragment In February’s blog post, "How your Brain is Like an Ant Colony", we discussed how neural networks follow the concept of...
Transposons: The Improvisers Inside Your Brain
Even if you from time to time think about your neurons, those little chemical-electrical switches that dictate your mental and physical...
The Anatomy of Emotion
What is fear made of? In his book Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Demasio describes emotions as complex, largely automated neural programs of...
Suicide: a Stark Truth
StartFragment Suicide: the word itself is sobering. In the U.S., there are 38,000 suicides a year. This makes it one of the top ten...
Old science and new horizons
The human brain is one of the true wonders of the world; after all, it contained the source material for building each of the seven...
Caffeine, Friend or Foe?
One thing's for sure: Americans love their coffee. According to the National Coffee Association, we drink an average of 3.1 cups a day...
Your Brain on Idle
Idleness is the Devil's workshop, or so the saying goes. Blame it on our Puritan origins if you like, but Americans take fewer vacation...
The Brain as a Supercomputer
Have you ever wondered how your brain and your smartphone's operating systems compare? After all, people commonly draw analogies between...
Talking to the Brain: How One Scientist Skipped the Middle Man—and Found Deep Philosophical Truths
Imagine waking up in a hospital room, unable to move. You can hear the doctor telling someone that they're not sure what level of brain...
Facing Victory: Inside the Brain of a Chess Champion
Susan Polgar is considered a chess genius; at 21, she was the first woman in the world to become a Grandmaster. Her chess skills are so...
