Tag: brains and behavior

Injecting a Gene Into Monkeys’ Brains Curbed Their Alcohol Use

When they conducted postmortem examinations of the monkeys’ brains, the team also confirmed that the treated animals had replenished levels of dopamine. In the...

A Brain Chemical Helps Neurons Know When to Start a Movement

By washing through the brain, neuromodulators “allow you to govern the excitability of a large region of the brain more or less in the...

Neural Noise Shows the Uncertainty of Our Memories

In the moment between reading a phone number and punching it into your phone, you may find that the digits have mysteriously gone astray—even...

How Computationally Complex Is a Single Neuron?

Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the...

How to Remember a Disaster Without Being Shattered by It

McKinnon had grown up listening to police and fire scanners. Her father was a deputy fire marshal, and her mother was a nurse. From...

The Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Be Meaningful After All

At a sleep research symposium in January 2020, Janna Lendner presented findings that hint at a way to look at people’s brain activity for...

A New Way to Restore Hand Mobility—With an Electrified Patch

The proverbial story of overcoming paralysis tends to start with the legs: Superman vows to walk again; a soap opera character steps out...

Deep Neural Networks Are Helping Decipher How Brains Work

In the winter of 2011, Daniel Yamins, a postdoctoral researcher in computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, would at times toil past...

A New Way to Plug a Human Brain into a Computer: via Veins

Much more ambitious brain-computer interfaces and neural prosthetics have been in the news lately. Last month, Elon Musk’s company Neuralink demonstrated a wireless BCI...

Your Brain Prefers Happy Endings. That’s Not Always Smart

When the researchers compared the scans of participants, they found that those who most often correctly chose the pot with the most money had...

Can Placebos Work—Even When Patients Know They’re Fake?

For that reason, Tor Wager, a professor of neuroscience at Dartmouth College and a co-author of the study, says it will be important to...

Want Some Eco-Friendly Tips? A New Study Says No, You Don’t

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.Need something else for your growing to-do list? Environmentalists have...

This Is My Brain on Salvia

When your attention turns inward, the communication between the brain regions in the default mode network syncs up like musicians in an orchestra. Other...

During Covid, Eating Disorder Patients Turn to Apps

Heather was 14 years old when an eating disorder took over her life. Twelve years and one global pandemic later, mandated shelter-in-place orders terminated...

Why Is It So Hard to Study Covid-Related Smell Loss?

In March, scientists in the United Kingdom started to notice an unexpected phenomenon. Alongside a fever, dry cough, and general malaise, Covid-19 patients were...

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