Feeling & KnowingAntonio DamasioPantheon, $26 Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio believes that the link between brain and body is the key to understanding consciousness. In his latest book, Feeling & Knowing: Making…
Category: Neuroscience
Brainless sponges contain early echoes of a nervous system
Brains are like sponges, slurping up new information. But sponges may also be a little bit like brains. Sponges, which are humans’ very distant evolutionary relatives, don’t have nervous systems.…
A blood test may help predict recovery from traumatic brain injury
Elevated blood levels of a specific protein may help scientists predict who has a better chance of bouncing back from a traumatic brain injury. The protein, called neurofilament light or…
Ripples in rats’ brains tied to memory may also reduce sugar levels
Ripples of nerve cell activity that lock in memories may have an unexpected job outside of the brain: Dropping blood sugar levels in the body. Just after a burst of…
How Hans Berger’s quest for telepathy spurred modern brain science
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during maneuvers…
Controlling nerve cells with light opened new ways to study the brain
Some big scientific discoveries aren’t actually discovered. They are borrowed. That’s what happened when scientists enlisted proteins from an unlikely lender: green algae. Cells of the algal species Chlamydomonas reinhardtii…
A deep look at a speck of human brain reveals never-before-seen quirks
A new view of the human brain shows its cellular residents in all their wild and weird glory. The map, drawn from a tiny piece of a woman’s brain, charts…
FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug despite controversy over whether it works
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a controversial Alzheimer’s treatment, the first that promises to slow the disease’s destruction in the brain, not just improve symptoms. The drug,…
A sweet father-son bond inspires tasty new molecule models
Thirteen-year-old Noah Shaw loves planets and has perfect pitch. He wants to be a scientist like his father Bryan Shaw, a biochemist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. But Noah’s…
Playing brain training games regularly doesn’t boost brainpower
It’s an attractive idea: By playing online problem-solving, matching and other games for a few minutes a day, people can improve such mental abilities as reasoning, verbal skills and memory.…
