Focus Makes Perfect: When To Think, And When Not To, When Playing Sports
At mile three of the 2012 Charlottesville Marathon, I was winning. Feeling comfortable and ecstatic about my position, I was also honored with a personal escort, biking alongside, to lead my way. But I...
View ArticleYou Can Dilate Your Pupils Just by Thinking
You have more control over your body than you might think. Take your pupils. The small black dots are our window on the ever-changing world. As light waxes and wanes, our pupils contract and dilate. It...
View ArticleTeaching the Nervous System to Forget Chronic Pain
“It was an emergency situation,” she says. The horse Sally was riding was barreling straight towards another, younger horse, and the only way to stop him was to pull back on one rein, hard. She felt a...
View ArticleWhat Schizophrenia Can Teach Us About Ourselves
“I don’t believe in anything. That’s my cardinal rule. I do it for my mental health. If I believe in God, then I start talking to God and God starts talking to me. As soon as I start believing in...
View ArticleWhat Makes a Resilient Mind
Standing at a podium in a Philadelphia hotel, Amanda Lindhout—a poised, elegant woman in her early 30s—told a harrowing story. She survived a violent childhood and adolescence in Canada with an...
View ArticleCan Early Intervention Prevent Autism?
Even before he was born, Kristin Hinson knew her son Noah’s odds of developing autism were high. When a child is diagnosed with the disorder, a younger sibling has a heightened risk of receiving the...
View ArticleCan Neuroscience Determine Guilt or Innocence?
In July 2009, a 59-year-old Welshman named Brian Thomas strangled his wife Christine to death in the middle of the night while the couple were vacationing in their camper van. There was no question he...
View ArticleAn Inflammatory Theory of Brain Disease
Beginning in March, 2010, 882 men and women who had suffered traumatic brain injury were enrolled in a clinical trial to test whether administering the human hormone progesterone within four hours...
View ArticleSneaking into the Brain with Nanoparticles
About a decade ago, Beverly Rzigalinski, a molecular biologist now at Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, was asked by a colleague to look into nanoparticles. “Nanoparticles? Yuck,” she thought....
View ArticleStem Cells Finally Deliver, But Not on Their Original Promise
To scientists, stem cells represent the potential of the human body to heal itself. The cells are our body’s wide-eyed kindergarteners—they have the potential to do pretty much anything, from helping...
View ArticleWhen Does Consciousness Begin and End?
In March of this year, the beloved singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell was rushed to the hospital after being found unconscious on the floor in her Bel Air home. Subsequently, long-time friend Leslie...
View ArticleHow Sleep Can Heal Our Brains
“The thing about sleep that is maddening is we don’t know what it’s for,” Paul Shaw says with a hint of frustration. Rather than truly grasping the role sleep plays in our complicated biology, the...
View ArticleUnlocking the Brain’s Deepest Secrets
In neuroscience, neurons get all the glory. Or rather, they used to. Researchers are beginning to discover the importance of something outside the neurons—a structure called the perineuronal net. This...
View ArticleA Pill-Free Antidepressant
As Rachel Force bobs around her classroom at Elon University in North Carolina, she sports a blue headband and fanny pack, two accessories that are actually part of a device that delivers a low-level...
View ArticleHitting the Brain’s Reset Button
When Jonathan Lubecky tries to pinpoint the lowest point of his life, he has a hard time picking one. There was the day in 2006 the former Army Sergeant came home from Iraq to find his wife gone, along...
View ArticleOur Brains Instantly Make Two Copies of Each Memory
For decades, we’ve thought that memories were formed in two distinct stages—short-term first, then long-term later. We might be wrong. New research suggests that our brains make two copies of each...
View ArticleThe Supercomputer That Could Map the Human Brain
Bobby Kasthuri has a problem. In an effort to understand, on the finest level, what makes us human, he’s set out to create a complete map of the human brain: to chart where every neuron connects to...
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