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The brain is behavior.
It's that time of year again. My gym is chock full of New Year's resolutioners--hogging treadmills and filling up space in already tight Zumba classes, desperate to lose a few pounds in 2013. We know that most of these people won't keep to their weight loss resolutions. In a few weeks, the ...
It's the end of the year--which means I'm reflecting on all manner of things. It's been an incredible year for me. DIRTY MINDS: HOW OUR BRAINS INFLUENCE LOVE, SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS came out in January. (As an interesting aside, it will come out in paperback come March 2013 as THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ...
Every moment we walk around in this big, bad world, our brains somehow make sense of the environment around us. They manage, somehow, to process an incredible amount of visual information as we move and interact with objects and other people, highlighting the important items and discarding ...
Jeff Leach is an anthropologist with an unusual interest: the contents of your gut. After his daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, he became very interested in how diet and lifestyle may influence disease states. And now, in partnership with the University of Colorado at Boulder's Rob ...
Have you gotten a measure of your attention skills on a site like Lumosity? Has a physician recommended that your elderly parent give software like BrainHQ a try? Did you get an online assessment before a military deployment? Then you are already part of the booming Digital Brain Health market ...
Neuroscience chatter this week has focused on a scientific celebrity--or at least, that celebrity's post-mortem brain. After Albert Einstein died in 1955, he donated his brain to science. It was then sliced into 240 blocks and distributed to nearly two dozen researchers. Many of those specimens ...
Once upon a time, my marriage was falling apart. So my now ex-husband and I did what many couples do. We sought out the services of a therapist specializing in marital issues. Admittedly, it was an action of last resort. We were at the point where I don't think we knew what else to do to ...
You know the old Facebook line: relationships are complicated. Paul C. Brunson, the Modern Day Matchmaker, knows that better than anyone else. And his new book, IT'S COMPLICATED (BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE): A MODERN GUIDE TO FINDING AND KEEPING LOVE, approaches self-help with a new angle: by ...
Susannah Cahalan was just another ambitious New York kind of girl--a fast-rising cub reporter at the New York Post and fabulous gal about town--when something surprising happened. She lost her mind. In her new book, BRAIN ON FIRE: MY MONTH OF MADNESS, Cahalan takes on a Herculean task that ...
As I travel around and talk about the neuroscience of orgasm, there is one question I am consistently asked--usually by a particularly curious and outgoing person of the male persuasion: "Is my orgasm the same as my female partner's orgasm?" There are questions about whether neuroscience can ...
What is it about hot yoga? While many of my friends are real fitness addicts, none compete at the level of those I know who are into Bikram Yoga. They are crazy about it. So when I heard that Benjamin Lorr had written a book about Bikram yoga--which was part memoir, part history and part science ...
Have you ever sliced up a human brain? I'll be honest: I've only done it once. I don't remember much about it--it was a long time ago. But I recall that the consistency and feeling of the brain through my rubber gloves was not at all what I expected (though I could not, for the life of me ...
Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for their pioneering work in cell reprogramming. The decision was not without controversy. Since Gurdon's early work was used as the basis for cloning projects (including Dolly the sheep), cell ...
Where, oh where, does intelligence come from? Genes seem a sure bet--or at least a significant player in a pool of important factors. After all, scientific studies have long suggested that intelligence, as measured by intelligence quotient (IQ) tests, is heritable. If one of your parents has a ...
A few weeks ago, I received a few emails and Tweets asking my opinion of Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist and intelligence researcher from the London School of Economics, joining the ranks of BigThink bloggers. You may remember Kanazawa from last year--he caused a scientific and ...