Neuroscience

Neuroscience

You open an app and start scrolling, then suddenly it's an hour later. Sound familiar?
Blissful ignorance can be a rational choice.
The "Mind After Midnight" hypothesis aims to explain why night owls tend to suffer more negative health outcomes.
upload brain
Uploading your mind is not a pathway to immortality. Instead, it will create a possibly hostile digital doppelgänger.
Let's hope that squid don't evolve lungs and legs, or humanity might be in real trouble.
neuroplasticity
Long thought incapable of regenerating, we now know that brain cells can grow and reorganize. That, it turns out, is a mixed blessing.
When you imitate the speech of others, there’s a thin line between whether it’s a social asset or faux pas.
transhumanism
Proponents of transhumanism make big promises, such as a future in which we upload our minds into a supercomputer. But there is a fatal flaw in this argument: reductionism.
amygdala
Patients with amygdala damage rejected the widely accepted answer to the infamous "trolley problem," saying that it "hurts too much."
same-sex behavior
Turning off a gene called “Myc” has a surprising effect in male fruit flies: They start courting other males.
For over three decades, toxic proteins were believed to cause Alzheimer’s disease. However, recent studies suggest it might be metabolic reprogramming.
In the 1980s, some wardens started painting their cells with a shade of pink dubbed "Baker-Miller Pink."
Music and sounds only seem to reduce pain in mice when played at a specific volume.
sleep sound
the human brain remains highly responsive to sound during sleep, but it does not receive feedback from higher order areas — sort of like an orchestra with “the conductor missing.”
The world is aging, and with age comes vision decline. New research may have found how to improve eyesight in an accessible way.
The serotonin theory of depression started to be widely promoted in the 1990s, coinciding with a push to prescribe more SSRIs.
Myrkl (pronounced "miracle") is supposed to let you go wild without facing the consequences the next day. But does it actually work?
adhd alzheimer's disease
Noradrenaline-targeting drugs, including blood pressure, depression, and ADHD meds, improve Alzheimer's disease symptoms.
consciousness
A new finding that unconsciously processed images are distributed to higher-order brain networks requires the revision of a popular theory of consciousness.
It is all too easy for humans to fall into the cognitive trap of thinking that an entity that can use language fluently is sentient or intelligent.
From ibuprofen to fentanyl, it’s about meeting the pain where it’s at.
mosquitoes
The good news is that it can be countered with acne medication.
There is no long-term beneficial effect of medication on standardized test scores.
Does memory start to work only at a certain age?
angry hamsters
For 40 years, scientists thought a specific gene was linked to aggression in hamsters. Removing it, however, had violent consequences.
google AI
The engineer working on Google's AI, called LaMDA, suffers from what we could call Michelangelo Syndrome. Scientists must beware hubris.
In the age of distraction, don't we all want to read faster and more efficiently?
“It’s a big resource in the way the human genome is a big resource, in that you can go in and do discovery-based research."