Observations
How a Flawed Experiment “Proved” That Free Will Doesn’t Exist
It did no such thing—but the result has become conventional wisdom nevertheless
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Observations
Could Fruit Flies Reveal the Hidden Mechanisms of the Mind?
New understandings in neurobiology are emerging from experiments on Drosophila, raising hopes the tiny insect will aid insights into human cognition and dementia
Observations
Long Live the Multiverse!
The idea that our universe is just part of a much vaster cosmos has a long history—and it’s still very much with us
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When the Sky Falls, Where Will NASA Be?
Everybody duck and cover. Last week NASA shrugged and told Congress that it neither has the funding nor the resources to meet its goal of identifying 90 percent of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) 150 yards or more in diameter by 2020...
The Neurobiology of Dread
As Edward Munch seemed to intuit, dread is its own kind of pain. The Value of Dread by Andreas Olsson Columbia University, New York, N.Y..
Betting on Consciousness: Ancient Question Meets Ancient Game
Welcome to the seventh installment of
Mind Matters
Mind Matters is Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain.
Closing the Racial Achievement Gap
Welcome to the fifth installment of Mind Matters Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain. Each week, top researchers describe their disciplines' most significant new findings -- and what they, as fellow researchers, find most exciting, maddening, significant, odd, or otherwise noteworthy in the research driving their fields...
Paths to Enrichment: Better Digs & Fatherhood Enrich the Brain
Welcome to the fourth installment of
Mind Matters
Mind Matters is Sciam.com's "seminar blog" on the sciences of mind and brain.
Big Decision: Head or Gut? Hmm ...
This week's paper is On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect by Ap Dijksterhuis, Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren and Rick B.
The Costs of War: A Study Reignites the Debate Over Soldiers' Trauma
David Dobbs, our regular Mind Matters columnist, is taking advantage of the balmy weather to get some much-needed R&R. So we dug up one of the very first Mind Matters columns on account of it being newly topical.....
Through the Grid, a Window on Cognition
by A. David Redish, Ph.D. University of Minnesota Commentary on Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex," by Torkel Hafting, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I...
Grid Cells: Putting Rats in Their Places and (Maybe) Meaning in Life
Welcome to Mind Matters.
Below, in an enthralling pair of posts about how neural mechanisms of navigation may also underlie memory and cognition, neuroscientists James J...
The Organic Automaton
When will computers become living, sentient beings? In movies, it is commonly depicted as an abrupt, unforeseen epiphany. Ray Kurzweil has predicted (in our pages and elsewhere) that personal computers will be able to run real-time, full-up simulations of the human brain by the 2020s...
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