Happy Holidays. In this special issue we are reprinting our top stories of the past year. This article first appeared online in our “Mind” issue in March, 2021. The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are … Read more
A man paralyzed from the neck down due to a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2007 has shown he can communicate his thoughts, thanks to a brain implant system that translates his imagined handwriting into actual text. The device … Read more
Dogs that habitually hear a bell at chow time become classically conditioned to drool at the mere chime, as the physiologist Ivan Pavlov showed in the 1890s: Their brains learn to associate the bell with food and instruct the salivary … Read more
When Sarah, 36 years old and severely depressed, sat down in a lab with a head full of surgically implanted sensors last year, the last thing she expected was to spontaneously cackle. She hadn’t laughed like that — a real, … Read more
Researchers at UC San Francisco have successfully developed a “speech neuroprosthesis” that has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, translating signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appear as text on … Read more
Chronic pain is like a horror movie monster that sneaks up on you. It’s unpredictable, lingers silently, and when it strikes it’s often too late to tame. More diabolically, our best weapon against it—pain medication—can increase pain intensity over time. … Read more
Abstract There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism. The vast majority of brain imaging studies so far have focused on qualitative, gross pathology of moderate to severe cases, … Read more
In 2014, a story about one of Frankovich’s patients made the pages of a local newspaper. Other doctors had diagnosed the little girl with bipolar disorder, but the Stanford team treated her for PANS, and she’d made a dramatic recovery. … Read more
1. Barbizet, J. Yawning. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry 21, 203–209 (1958). CAS PubMed PubMed Central Article Google Scholar 2. Baenninger, R. Some comparative aspects of yawning in Betta splendens, Homo sapiens, Panthera leo, and Papio sphinx. J. Comp. Psychol. 101, … Read more
We humans have always experienced an odd — and oddly deep — connection between the mental worlds and physical worlds we inhabit, especially when it comes to memory. We’re good at remembering landmarks and settings, and if we give our … Read more