Part of my online life includes editorial duties at ResearchBlogging.org, where I serve as the Social Sciences Editor. Each Thursday, I pick notable posts on research in anthropology, philosophy, social science, and research to share on the ResearchBlogging.org News site. To help highlight this writing, I also share my selections here on AiP. Happy New Year! Bloggers [...]

I am thrilled to announce two big developments for Scientific American MIND today. We are launching a new home page, mind.scientificamerican.com, so that fans of the magazine can find our print and online articles, as well as multimedia, in one convenient location. Starting today, you’ll start to see several new contributors in the mix, which [...]

Will “Love Will Keep Us Together” or is it true that “Love Is a Battlefield”? Whereas the topic of romance has provided limitless inspiration for artists, writers and musicians, scientists are just as fascinated by affairs of the heart, though they seldom sing about it. Cupid’s unpredictable arrow explains little, so it can be more [...]

The next time you snap the waistband on your panties or enjoy a Speedos moment at the beach, have a moment of silence for the man who made it all possible—Wallace Carothers. The famous DuPont chemist and inventor of nylon (among other ubiquitous synthetic materials) was a very practical person, so much so that he [...]

This month the American Psychiatric Association will publish the latest edition of its standard guidebook for clinicians, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5 (DSM-5). In somewhat the same way that a field guide to birds helps people distinguish different species with illustrations and descriptions of physical features—a beak’s hooked tip, a blush [...]

We all lose brain cells as we get older. In people with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, neurons shrivel and die at alarming rates—perhaps three to four times faster than usual in Alzheimer’s, for example. Currently, no known drugs reliably halt or reverse such staggering cell death in people, although some drugs [...]

In the September 17th issue of The New Yorker, Anthony Gottlieb analyzes Homo Mysterious: Evolutionary Puzzles of Human Nature, a new book by David Barash, a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Gottlieb’s article is more than just a book review—it’s also the latest in a long line of critiques of evolutionary [...]

In the opening scene of Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls, the Horvaths tell their 24-year-old daughter Hannah that they will no longer support her—or, as her mother puts it: “No. More. Money.” A recent college graduate, Hannah has been living in Brooklyn, completing an unpaid internship and working on a series of personal essays. The [...]

The computer, smartphone or other electronic device on which you are reading this article has a rudimentary brain—kind of.* It has highly organized electrical circuits that store information and behave in specific, predictable ways, just like the interconnected cells in your brain. On the most fundamental level, electrical circuits and neurons are made of the [...]

In the 18th century Carl Linnaeus named them lemurs, after the Latin lemures—spirits of the dead, wandering ghosts. He knew the primates roamed Madagascar’s forests at night, their large eyes brimming with moonlight, their shrill cries crashing through the treetops. One of the smallest lemurs on the island, the fat-tailed dwarf lemur, resembled a phantom [...]

Previously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron Chapter 2: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons, or The Dendrology of the Neuron Forest Chapter 3: Know Your Neurons: Meet the Glia *By Daisy Yuhas Trillions of cells in your brain communicate with one another, respond to infections, guide [...]

Previously, on Know Your Neurons: Chapter 1: The Discovery and Naming of the Neuron Chapter 2: How to Classify Different Types of Neurons, or The Dendrology of the Neuron Forest Scientists have organized the cells that make up the nervous system into two broad groups: neurons, which are the primary signaling cells, and glia, which [...]

Over the years, I have taught my copy of Microsoft Word a lot of neuroscience terminology: amygdala, corpus callosum, dendritic spines, voxel. But it always knew what neuron meant. I thought I did too. Neurons—the electrically excitable cells that make up the brain and nervous system—first fascinated me in high school. In college, like so [...]

Welcome to the new Brainwaves blog. I am an associate editor at Scientific American, where I assign, edit and write articles for the magazine and website, mostly about neuroscience and psychology. I also frequently edit and write articles about health, biology, evolution and animal behavior. Here at Brainwaves I plan to focus on the brain [...]

Scientists are on the verge of building an artificial brain! How do I know? Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute said so right here on ScientificAmerican.com. He wrote that the goal of reverse-engineering the brain—which the National Academy of Engineering recently posed as one of its "grand challenges"—is "becoming increasingly plausible." Scientists are learning more [...]

In recent posts, I’ve knocked neuroframing, neuroweapons and neurobics. Next up: neuro-lit-crit. New York Times culture reporter Patricia Cohen reports that for insights and inspiration literary scholars are turning, inevitably, to neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. Philosophers are doing the same, as are art theorists, religious scholars, you name it. Edward Wilson must be thrilled. In [...]

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, [...]

The most surprising part of this story was that they managed to record brainwave activity from the sharks. This tale is about one of the most fascinating figures in the history of neuroscience: Dr. Robert Galambos. This is his story. Right: Robert Galambos, MD, PhD  Source: The New York Times Decades ago, Dr. Galambos discovered [...]

I witnessed a breakup yesterday in the middle of MIT’s vast Infinite Corridor—a hallway known for its heavy traffic and long stretch of straightness. Finals are upon the undergraduates, so perhaps tensions were a bit high for the young, failing couple. Something, however, had clearly pushed the girl overboard. Her boyfriend had fallen dramatically to [...]

Last week, Nature issued a new paper. The paper used two different strains of mice, one lacking all serotonin neurons (called Lmx1b knockouts), and one lacking the rate limiting enzyme for the production of serotonin (called TPH2 knockouts). The authors demonstrated that these mice, lacking serotonin, did not distinguish between sexual partners, mounting male and [...]

My wife and I keep pet rabbits. Observe their cuteness: We feed Jackson (he’s the black one) and Dutchess (she’s the big one) once each morning and once each night, and usually give them a few treats in between. A month or so ago, we noticed that when we open the refrigerator door they hop [...]

You might be surprised if you knew just how many scientists out there play in rock bands. When the sun goes down, garages, basements and living rooms throughout the land are filled with guys and gals who have shed their lab coats and strapped on their guitars. Take me, for instance—a mild mannered, middle-aged neuroscientist [...]

Déjà vu is not what “happens when they change something” in the Matrix. Here’s what really happens…

Naam, Ramez (2012-12-18). Nexus (Kindle Locations 5434-5437). Osprey Publishing. Kindle Edition. “Nexus’s ability to satisfy widespread human desires, combined with its innocuous perception, suggests that were the technology to ever enter the mainstream, the genie would prove very difficult to put back into the bottle. Nexus: A Risk Assessment (2033), ERD Library Series, 2039   [...]

“Once the preparations were complete, I was able to place each of my hands on a nest of knobs and levers and control a pair of manipulators situated behind my head, and use the periscope to see what they worked on. I would then be able to dissect my own brain.”     Our “Neuroscience [...]

By Ingrid Wickelgren For years, Scientific American has featured an extremely popular Guest Blog on this website. That space offers a unique venue for scientists and other outside contributors to share news, insights and commentary in their fields of expertise. It also provides an opportunity for knowledgeable people to air controversies and clear up confusions [...]

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Thursday approved the first retinal implant for use in the United States. The FDA’s green light for Second Sight’s Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System gives hope to those blinded by a rare genetic eye condition called advanced retinitis pigmentosa, which damages the light-sensitive cells that line the retina. For [...]

At least 1 in 4000 infants is born without a corpus callosum. This powerful body of connective white matter serves as the primary bridge between the brain’s hemispheres, allowing us to rapidly integrate complex information. “It’s a hidden disability,” says University of California Institute of Technology psychologist Lynn Paul. Many born without this structure go [...]

Last week, I and some 200 other attendees of the Global Trends 2030: U.S. Leadership in a Post-Western World conference got a thought-provoking look at the current “megatrends” leading to four possible futures for the world some 10 to 15 years from now. Cutting across all of them is the disruptive influence of emerging technologies—which [...]

In the Sunshine State, science is ready to bloom. On December 5, I attended the official grand opening of the new, $64 million, 100,000-square-foot Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience in Jupiter—and the first of the Max Planck Institutes outside of Europe. The institute will focus on the human brain, which scientific director and CEO [...]

Helmets protect your head—but they can’t fully protect your brain. This helps to explain why football players continue to incur brain trauma that may lead to debilitating brain disease. Recently, a team of researchers presented more evidence of the devastating progression of a brain disease caused by repeated brain trauma. On December 2, researchers from [...]

At right is a picture of someone’s brain as seen through functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI. This particular subject is taxing his neurons with a working memory task—those sunny orange specks represent brain activity related to the task. fMRI images show the brain according to changes in blood oxygen level, a proxy for degree [...]

Apollo Robbins, a.k.a the “Gentleman Thief,” explains his technique of managing attentional spotlight during the Neuromagic 2012conference on the Island of Thought, San Simón, near Vigo, Spain, while demonstrating on neuroscientist Flip Phillips of Skidmore College. Attentional spotlight is the focus of consciousness at any given moment, and it can be directed–or, as in magic, [...]

Early behavioral intervention has shown some promise as a way to help children with autism. But it’s difficult to see the hallmarks of autism before two years of age with today’s diagnostic criteria. Could we find other methods? Seeking to answer that question is Jed Elison at the California Institute of Technology, who is working [...]

“I see you have a watch with a buckle.” Standing at my side, Apollo Robbins held my wrist lightly as he turned my hand over and back. I knew exactly what was coming but I fell for it anyway. “Yes,” I said, trying to keep an eye on him, “that looks pretty easy for you [...]

PHILADELPHIA—In the summer of 2011 I began working on a feature article about a book that most people have never heard of—the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a reference guide for psychiatrists and clinicians. Most of the DSM‘s pages contain lists of symptoms that characterize different mental disorders (e.g. schizophrenia: delusions, hallucinations, [...]

Without genetic change we’d be nowhere—well perhaps just unicellular blobs kicking around in ponds. Alterations in DNA, such as point mutations, duplications, rearrangements and insertions from microbial neighbors, have helped humans and our deep-time ancestors climb out of the swamps and, in our case at least, start swimming in backyard pools. But these basic tools [...]

Hi Everyone! Scicurious here, and thrilled to be blogging with the fine folks you will see introduced over the next few days. I am a post-doc in neuroscience at a fancy R1 university, and I have a PhD in physiology from another fancy place. My professional interests are in neuroscience, especially in neurotransmitter interactions. Sci [...]

The November/December Scientific American Mind, which debuted online today, examines the origins of genius, a concept that inspires both awe and confusion. Some equate genius with IQ or creativity; others see it as extraordinary accomplishment. As this issue reveals, genius seems to arise from a mosaic of forces that coalesce into a perfect storm of [...]

By Ferris Jabr* Part 2 of a series In the offices of psychiatrists and psychologists across the country you can find a rather hefty tome called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM). The current edition of the DSM, the DSM-IV, is something like a field guide to mental disorders: the book pairs [...]

People who lose a limb often experience the sensation of still having the missing arm or leg. Phantom limbs, in fact, have spurred a whole line of independent research among neuroscientists. But it appears that all of us may be  capable of these sensations, even if arms and legs remain intact. If we can conjure [...]

Karl Deisseroth is a pioneer in optogenetics, the technology that has taken neuroscience by storm by enabling the use of optical and genetic methods to precisely control the switching on and off of individual neurons and brain circuits. Deisseroth and his team at Stanford have now come up with an entirely new method to explore [...]

I was watching one of the March Madness games recently with my son Benjamin. He is the only one in the world I can do this with because I can ask him what the difference is between the shot clock in the NBA and the one in the NCAA without being asked to immediately produce [...]

It was an anti-climax: the President of the United States clocking in after The New York Times had already spilled the beans about his big brain program, a centerpiece of the administration’s second-term, legacy-making efforts in the science arena. After the Times article, everyone had, for weeks, written, speculated, chewed over and made preparations for [...]

A little shuteye refreshes. Right, but what does that really mean? Not talking here about leaping out of bed ready for a five-mile run upon awakening, but rather about what’s happening at the level of individual brain cells deep inside your head. A new study by R. Douglas Fields, a pioneer in researching out-of-the-mainstream  brain [...]

Two prominent neuroscientists have published a commentary in the Feb. 28th Nature suggesting that video games might be crafted to improve brain function and enhance personal well-being. In “Games To Do You Good,” they cite prospects for bettering performance on behavioral measures ranging from visual perception to altruism. Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester [...]

Miguel Nicolelis is a brilliant neuroscientist (and showman) who is constantly trying to explore how far technology that uses brain signals to control machines can be pushed. In his 2012 book Beyond Boundaries, he speculated about an experiment in which two rat brains would exchange information—telepathic tweets, if you will. He wrote in one chapter: [...]

The era of Big Neuroscience has arrived. In late January, The Human Brain Project—an attempt to create a computer simulation of the brain at every scale from the nano nano to the macro biotic—announced that it had successfully arranged a billion Euro funding package for a 10-year run. And then on Feb. 18, an article [...]

What may have been Rita Levi-Montalcini’s last paper was published almost a year ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. By no means a retrospective of a career that produced a Nobel Prize, the paper (“Nerve growth factor regulates axial rotation during early stages of chick embryo development”) added still one more [...]

James R. Flynn’s observation that IQ scores experienced dramatic gains from generation to generation throughout the 20th century has been cited so often, even in popular media, that it is becoming a cocktail party talking point. Next stop a New Yorker cartoon. (An article about Flynn and the Flynn effect has already been published in [...]

I’m still playing a bit of catch-up after last week’s AZA conference. In the meantime, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 was published this week, which includes a piece I originally posted in July, 2011. In honor of the publication, I’m reposting that piece, below. Also, check out my new fortnightly column at BBC Future, [...]

The largest fish in the ocean is the whale shark (Rhincodon typus). This massive, migratory fish can grow up to twelve meters in length, but its enormous mouth is designed to eat the smallest of critters: plankton. While the biggest, the whale shark isn’t the only gigantic filter-feeding shark out there: the basking shark and [...]

It’s better than an ant farm. It’s more exciting than a flea circus. Welcome to Cricket Fight Club. The first rule of Cricket Fight Club is: you do not talk about Cricket Fight Club. The second rule of Cricket Fight Club is: you do not talk about Cricket Fight Club. In aggressive conflicts between individuals [...]

An animal rights group has sued SeaWorld. Their claim is that SeaWorld should not be holding killer whales in captivity. So far, this is a fairly unsurprising story, and one that may have merit enough to debate. But here’s where the story seems to go off the rails: the argument is that the thirteenth amendment [...]

At their most fundamental level, brains are made up of neurons. And those neurons collectively comprise the two main types of brain tissue: white matter is made up primarily of axons, and grey matter is made up of synapses, or the connections between neurons. (Want a primer on the neuron? Check out this explainer post [...]

Vision is arguably our most (consciously) utilized sensory system, so its pretty important to figure out how it works. And it’s what David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel set out to investigate starting in the late 1950s. Ultimately, their work would get them a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in 1981.