brains and behavior

Imagine spending a weekend afternoon with friends at an art museum: nodding with crossed arms, desperately searching for something insightful to say. The vast majority of paintings you stroll past are immediately forgotten, but some stick…

The world of brain research has a secret flaw. For decades, studies into how the mind works have been carried out primarily by English-speaking scientists on English-speaking participants. Yet their conclusions have been branded as…

As a physical therapist in Shanghai, Zheng Wang worked with people recovering from strokes after their brains had been damaged by oxygen deprivation. They usually followed a predictable recovery pattern, making lots of progress over the…

Music that is simple, repetitive, and easy to sing (or hum) is most likely to get stuck. Think Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” and Queen’s classic “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and the title-says-it-all track “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” by Kylie…

Gideon Lichfield: I'm sure it will be if it isn't already. No, totally, I think we're gonna get a hydroponic organic psilocybin encased in artisanal, ethically sourced chocolate harvested from the Western-facing slopes of some mountain in…

The tiny foragers are also “remarkable learners” that can remember something after a single exposure to it, Crossley said. In the new study, the researchers peered deep into the snails’ brains to figure out what happened at the neurological…

If you’ve spent any time playing Dead Island 2, chances are you’ve noticed the game’s progressive damage system. The Fully Locational Evisceration System for Humanoids, or FLESH, as developer Dambuster Studios call it, is a procedural tool…

They then administered a single low dose of klotho under each monkey’s skin, raising levels of the protein to those normally present in the animals at birth. Four hours later, researchers had them complete the food-finding task in batches…

That first year, Fireside trained more than 100 volunteers and conducted some 2,550 conversations with callers—including Greenberg. Within months of reaching Jasmine, he had walked away from his job (and psychedelically high salary) to…

Human olfactory receptors belong to an enormous family of proteins known as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Situated within cell membranes, these proteins contribute to a vast array of physiological processes by detecting all kinds of…