neuroscience

Our brains can store huge amounts of information, but forgetting some of that information may actually make us smarter.

Could The Best Memory System Be One That Forgets?

3:56pm June 23, 2017

by Andrea Hsu

Forget thinking about forgetting as failure. Researchers now say that ridding our brains of irrelevant details and outdated information helps us better navigate our ever-changing world.

Scientists think that dreams are a form of memory consolidation.

Forget Freud: Dreams Replay Our Everyday Lives

11:42am June 22, 2017

by Jon Hamilton

Sigmund Freud thought dreams were all about wish fulfillment and repressed desire. But scientists now think they're linked to memory processing and consciousness. And they're often quite mundane.

Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare brain disease in 2010, and then learned she had inherited the same genetic mutation. She and her husband, Eric Minikel, went back to school to study the family of illnesses — prion diseases — in the hope of find

A Couple's Quest To Stop A Rare Disease Before It Takes One Of Them

4:33pm June 19, 2017

by Rae Ellen Bichell

Twenty years. That's how long two grad students, Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel, think they have before a deadly disease envelops Sonia's brain. The Massachusetts couple is now racing to find a cure.

In a study that tested the vision of people from a variety of professions, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley found that dressmakers who spend many hours doing fine, manual work seemed to have a superior ability to see in 3-D.

Research Finds Dressmakers Have Good Eyes, And Not Just For Style

1:52pm June 16, 2017

by Andrea Hsu

In a study of people from a variety of professions, dressmakers were found to have superior 3-D vision. Could their endless hours of delicate handwork be honing eyesight?

Surgery that severed the connection between brain hemispheres reveals that those halves see the world in vastly different ways.

The Roots Of Consciousness: We're Of Two Minds

10:48pm June 15, 2017

by Kerin Higa

Surgery that severs the link between brain hemispheres reveals that those halves have way different views of the world. We ask a pioneering scientist what that tells us about human consciousness.

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When the neurons that release the neurotransmitter dopamine die, people develop Parkinson's disease.

Brain Cell Transplants Are Being Tested Once Again For Parkinson's

5:06pm June 13, 2017

by Jon Hamilton

In 2003, researchers declared a moratorium on the use of transplanted brain cells to treat Parkinson's disease. Now, armed with better cells, they're giving the approach another try.

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NIH Director Francis Collins and Renée Fleming, who is Artistic Advisor at Large for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., sing a duet.

The Soprano And The Scientist: A Conversation About Music And Medicine

5:31pm June 02, 2017

NIH Director Francis Collins and Renée Fleming, who is Artistic Advisor at Large for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., discuss music and medicine. They also sing a duet.

Eight different real faces were shown to a monkey. The images were then reconstructed using analyzing electrical activity from 205 neurons recorded while the monkey was viewing the faces.

Cracking The Code That Lets The Brain ID Any Face, Fast

5:14pm June 01, 2017

by Jon Hamilton

People and other primates have an amazing ability to instantly recognize faces. Scientists at Caltech found that we do that by having 205 specialized brain cells divvy up the task.

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One doctor's account of the personality shift in Phineas Gage following the accident.

Why Brain Scientists Are Still Obsessed With The Curious Case Of Phineas Gage

5:00am May 21, 2017

by Jon Hamilton

In 1848, a railroad worker survived an accident that drove a 13-pound iron bar through his head. The injury changed his personality, and our understanding of the brain.

There is a hot zone in the back of the brain that can reveal what we are dreaming, according to new research.

A 'Hot Zone' In The Brain May Reveal When, And Even What, We Dream

8:08pm April 10, 2017

by Jon Hamilton

When people have dreams, an area near the back of the brain seems to wake up. And specific patterns of brain activity in that area can even reveal what we're dreaming about.

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