by Melinda Wenner from Scientific American " Fantasizing about sex gets more than just your juices flowing—it also boosts your analytical thinking skills. Daydreaming about love, on the other hand, makes you more creative, according to a study published in the November 2009 Personality and Social...

By Richard E. Cytowic in Seed Magazine "From my perspective as a neurologist who studies minds and as a creative writer who imagines characters’ inner lives, Virginia Woolf’s mind is a marvel to behold. No two books are alike. “Not this, not that,” she seems to be saying as she rejects convention...

by Celeste Biever in New Scientist "THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions....

by Ray Tallis from New Scientist "Most neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest...

by Ed Yong and Alice Fishburn from Seed Magazine "Imagine if you could rewrite your mind as quickly as a document on your computer. No more painful memories, no phobias or ingrained fears, just a blank slate where the scars that mark each human life used to be. This may sound like the stuff of Hollywood...

by Lorna Casselton and James Wilsdon for Seed Magazine "Last week, top scientists from more than 100 countries gathered in London for one of the biggest scientific meetings of the year: the InterAcademy Panel. Hosted by the Royal Society as part of its 350th anniversary celebrations, the Panel brings...

by Elizabeth Landau for CNN "Henry Molaison, known as H.M. in scientific literature, was perhaps the most famous patient in all of brain science in the 20th century. "My daddy's family came from the South and moved North, they came from Thibodaux Louisiana, and moved north," Molaison...

by Eric Jaffe for the Los Angeles Times "If your doctor advised a treatment that involved leeches and bloodletting, you might take a second glance at that diploma on the wall. For the same reason, you should think twice about whom you see as a therapist, says a team of psychological researchers...

by Maura Pilotti in Metapsychology Online Reviews "For Carl F. Craver, the philosophy of neuroscience has a labor-intensive and challenging objective to realize and a fundamental truth to reveal. Its objective is to make explicit the 'widely accepted though largely implicit standards' upon...

by Ron Rosenbaum from Slate "There's a certain kind of mystery—unsolved and probably insoluble—that has a seductive attraction for me. I think the insolubility is the attraction. Historical and literary mysteries: What was the origin of Hitler's hatred? Did Shakespeare revise Hamlet ? And...

Joaquín M. Fuster Converging evidence from humans and nonhuman primates is obliging us to abandon conventional models in favor of a radically different, distributed-network paradigm of cortical memory. Central to the new paradigm is the concept of memory network or cognit—that is, a memory or an item...

Felipe De Brigard, Eric Mandelbaum, David Ripley Some theorists think that the more we get to know about the neural underpinnings of our behaviors, the less likely we will be to hold people responsible for their actions. This intuition has driven some to suspect that as neuroscience gains insight into...

Erik Bijleveld, Ruud Custers, and Henk Aarts No abstract available. Read the article .

By Terry Regier and Paul Kay "The Whorf hypothesis holds that we view the world filtered through the semantic categories of our native language. Over the years, consensus has oscillated between embrace and dismissal of this hypothesis. Here, we review recent findings on the naming and perception...

Marcia K. Johnson , Susan Nolen-Hoeksema , Karen J. Mitchell and Yael Levin Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated neural activity associated with self-reflection in depressed [current major depressive episode (MDE)] and healthy control participants, focusing on medial cortex areas...

Arwen B. Long, Cynthia M. Kuhn and Michael L. Platt Some people love taking risks, while others avoid gambles at all costs. The neural mechanisms underlying individual variation in preference for risky or certain outcomes, however, remain poorly understood. Although behavioral pathologies associated...

Liviu G. Cri an, Simona Pan , Romana Vulturar, Renata M. Heilman, Raluca Szekely,Bogdan Drug and Andrei C. Miu Serotonin (5-HT) modulates emotional and cognitive functions such as fear conditioning (FC) and decision making. This study investigated the effects of a functional polymorphism in the regulatory...

Martin Heisenberg Scientists and philosophers are using new discoveries in neuroscience to question the idea of free will. They are misguided, says Martin Heisenberg. Examining animal behaviour shows how our actions can be free... Read the essay.

Abstract: The optimal responses for many decisions faced by humans are ill defined, yet we are able to choose well by associating choices with outcomes, and employing this information in decision making.Previous studies suggest that the parietal cortex is involved in ‘‘uncertain’’ decision making, yet...

" Michael S. Gazzaniga, a pioneer and world leader in cognitive neuroscience, has made an initial attempt to develop neuroethics into a brain-based philosophy of life that he hopes will replace the irrational religious and political belief-systems that still partly govern modern societies. This...