It’s all about the reward
neuroscience
How Speed Dating Works—In the Brain
Dating is all about making snap judgments, and scientists have located where in the brain those decisions are made.
Why Solving Puzzles Is Fun: Q&A with Consciousness Researcher Daniel Bor
The evolutionary link between acquiring good information and survival may have given rise to both consciousness and the pleasure of problem-solving
Naomi Wolf’s Vagina Aside, What Neuroscience Really Says About Female Desire
The controversy surrounding journalist Naomi Wolf’s new book, Vagina: A Cultural History — an exploration of the brain-vagina connection — has brought fresh attention to the nature and neuroscience of female sexuality. …
Making Choices: How Your Brain Decides
Two distinct brain networks guide our reasoning and the behaviors we ultimately undertake based on those judgments
My Brain Made Me Do It: Psychopaths and Free Will
Why judges hand down shorter sentences to convicted psychopaths when their behavior is blamed on the brain
Why Humans Have Color Vision, and Other Qs & As with Neuroscientist Mark Changizi
Why do humans see in color? According to neuroscientist Mark Changizi, who left academia to run a research institute called 2Ai, it’s so that we could read the emotions of others. In his book, Harnessed, published last summer, …
New York State of Mind? Research Reveals Brain Wiring Is Laid Out Like a Grid
To the uninitiated, the brain’s connections may look like a plate of tangled spaghetti, but new research suggests that there is symmetry hidden in the apparent chaos.
Q&A: Are You Just the Sum of Your Brain’s Connections?
Sebastian Seung, professor of computational neuroscience and physics at MIT and author of the new book, Connectome, argues that you are.
The Criminal Mind: How Drugs and Violence May Affect the Brain
Brain imaging studies of violent criminals are difficult to interpret because the most persistent among them — those who are responsible for a disproportionate amount of all crime — are not only violent but also …
Taming the Smoker’s Brain: A Better Way to Quit?
Any American who has bought a pack of cigarettes since the mid-’60s might have seen the health warnings. One of the first, quaint and timid, said, “Cigarette Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health.”
Wait, ESP Is Real?
The idea that some people can see the future is one of those peculiar notions that is at once prehistoric and contemporary. You can find references to seers at least as far back as writing from ancient Greece, and you can also …
The Bright Side of Anger — It Motivates Others
On the whole, brain scans shore up what we’ve known all along about our emotions: some are positive and some are negative.