About one in eight women in the United States experiences postpartum depression after giving birth. Soon, there may finally be a convenient, fast-acting medication to treat it—if the Food and Drug Administration gives it the green light. The pill, called zuranolone, is taken over the course of 14 days and works to relieve depressive symptoms […]
Read MoreImagine 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 in your mind. As it turns out, the paintings you remember are likely the same ones everyone else does. […]
Read MoreThe 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 universal. Now, a growing body of work suggests that there are subtle cognitive differences between populations who speak different languages—differences […]
Read MoreMusic 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 Minogue. Even the Rocky theme song can fight its way in. Nursery rhymes and kid-friendly tunes […]
Read MoreGideon 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 Nicaragua, and it’s gonna be very expensive. And somebody with a very snooty head, who’s gonna be standing […]
Read MoreThe 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 level when they were acquiring memories. Coaxing Memories In their experiments, the researchers gave the snails […]
Read MoreThat 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 focus on work “that adds value to the universe.” Eventually he got on the phone with Fireside again—this time not to […]
Read MoreHuman 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 stimuli, from light to hormones. Over the past two decades, researchers have determined detailed structures for an ever-expanding number of GPCRs—but […]
Read MoreAbout a month into the 2020 pandemic lockdown, Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist, noticed that she had come untethered from reality. “Everything felt sort of swooshy,” she says, as if she was in an “altered, mystical state.” She wasn’t constantly obsessing over her lab at Johns Hopkins University. She chilled out. And for the first time […]
Read MoreThe neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such […]
Read MoreEventually, Xenofon Strakosas, an assistant professor working in Berggren’s lab, figured out the problem: In plants, hydrogen peroxide helps the injected material bond together, but there isn’t enough peroxide in animals for the reaction to work. So Strakosas added some additional elements to the mix: an enzyme that uses glucose or lactate, which are common […]
Read MoreMedieval monks were, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early Christians who had shown remarkable commitment to their work. There was Sarah, who lived next to a river without ever once looking in its direction, such […]
Read MoreLike much of the internet, PubPeer is the sort of place where you might want to be anonymous. There, under randomly assigned taxonomic names like Actinopolyspora biskrensis (a bacterium) and Hoya camphorifolia (a flowering plant), “sleuths” meticulously document mistakes in the scientific literature. Though they write about all sorts of errors, from bungled statistics to nonsensical methodology, their collective […]
Read MoreMemory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise […]
Read MoreA mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of lights ahead. Through training, the mouse has learned that if it stops at the lights and holds that position for 1.5 seconds, it will receive a […]
Read MoreBlack widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets, or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. “The big question that motivated the work was just wanting to know […]
Read MoreFurther evidence of this bias comes from the reaction of the mice when they were first put into learning situations. Before they knew whether the new associations would be positive or negative, the release of neurotensin from their thalamic neurons decreased. The researchers speculate that new stimuli are assigned a more negative valence automatically until […]
Read MoreIn the new study’s first phase, each subject had their moment in front of the GoPros and microphone. Previous studies have established that tickling is mood-dependent—anxiety and unfamiliarity suppress it like a wet blanket. Since participants would have to take turns tickling each other, Brecht’s team made sure each pair knew each other beforehand and […]
Read MoreSo neuroscientists use an approach called “dimensionality reduction” to make such visualization possible—they take data from thousands of neurons and, by applying clever techniques from linear algebra, describe their activities using just a few variables. This is just what psychologists did in the 1990s to define their five major domains of human personality: openness, agreeableness, […]
Read MoreThis was slow going. “We spent a lot of time, probably the first couple of years, really just working out the immunopanning and culturing the astrocytes,” recalls Caldwell. One challenge was making sure that the media contained few proteins to start with—those would have interfered with their measurements. The scientists also needed to make sure […]
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