Neuroscience

You can't read a book like the excellent Conversations on Consciousness (interviews with experts in the field of consciousness), by Susan Blackmore (not pictured above), without having…

A study on activity in a the parahippocampal cortex (PHC) found people will remember a visual scene when the brain is more active. The PHC, which has previously been linked to recollection of visual…

In patients with seriously altered states of consciousness, there is also the puzzle about dreaming.   Do ‘vegetative’ patients (also known in clunkier, politically correct fashion as patients…

Most of us don’t have a problem attributing emotions to primates, dogs, horses and other vertebrates. But what about invertebrates? That seems less obvious. They have smaller, less complex brains,…

For the crowd watching an Illinois high school football game last fall, it was a sickening feeling watching one of their Unity High School cornerbacks collapse to the ground after delivering a heads-…

The brain is quite complex (talking about an understatement), with its billions of neurons with many connections between them. These neurons and their connections form an intricate three-dimensional…

Age does  a lot of things to us. And to our brains, which shrink when we grow older. Those incredibly complex neural networks inside our skulls not only shrink, but they also become more…

A perhaps somewhat lugubrious study, published in PLoS ONE, set out to investigate whether decapitation is a humane method of euthanasia in small animals, such as rats and birds. To do this, they…

New neurological research, using, of course, the ever-popular giant axon of squid, shows that neurons are pretty darn clever at picking signal out of noise. And what's more, they're sensitive to…

Sometimes a person who gets drunk can perform functions their friends might regard as ordinary, like carrying on a conversation or driving a car - but the drunkard might have no memory of those…