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The brain is behavior.
I interviewed Paul Zak, founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University, for the first time two years ago. We met for a coffee at Neuroscience 2010, the largest neuroscience conference in the world—and before I could ask a single question, he told me, “I ...
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing quite a bit about monogamy—especially within the context of human marriage and what is supposedly “natural.” I use the quotes intentionally. Mostly because I’m so surprised that so many people are convinced that monogamy—heterosexual, human monogamy, in ...
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Katie Hinde is the Director of the Comparative Lactation Laboratory at Harvard University. Her research examines mother's milk and how it contributes to infant development in humans and primates--including behavior, cognition and the brain. Here, she discusses the effects of breast milk on ...
Blunt head trauma and traumatic brain injuries are well-known artifacts of war. The Brain Trauma Foundation reports that between 10-20% of Iraq veterans (approximately 150,000-300,000 individuals) suffer from some level of TBI. That’s a lot of former soldiers who may be experiencing symptoms like ...
In response to the passing of Amendment One in North Carolina and President Obama's recent comments supporting same-sex marriage, I've included a short excerpt about sexual orientation and the brain from my book, Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence Love, Sex, and Relationships: Is what I ...
I've never understood those weight guessing games offered at your more low-rent carnivals. Yet, across the country, people hand over their hard-earned dollars, driven by a curiosity about whether their physical beings sync up with a rather arbitrary number. I don't get it--and said as much, on the ...
Schizophrenia is a complex and devastating psychiatric disorder that affects approximately one percent of people in the United States. It is best known for its outward symptoms: hallucinations, delusions and, at its most severe, psychosis. But schizophrenia’s associated cognitive deficits ...
The brain is a complex and demanding machine. Given the amount of resources required to run the average brain, it’s no surprise that it takes a few shortcuts when it can. After all, it’s the ultimate multi-tasker—and needs to distribute its energy in a smart and efficient fashion. And now, a ...
Sex hormones like estrogen and testosterone don't just race around the body, helping to facilitate reproductive behaviors. We now know that the brain is full of receptors for these sex steroids, and that these hormones act on brain cells both as a mediator--helping other chemicals do their work in ...
Just when you think you've gotten away from the so-called "grandmother cell," it comes around again. It's the proverbial Whack-A-Mole in the neuroscience world. No matter how many times the idea is struck down, it pops back up--often, with a vengeance (or, these days, a popular actress). But I ...
Some refer to neuroimaging studies as "modern-day phrenology." With such captivating visual results, it can be easy to forget that neuroimaging is simply a tool: a high-tech correlation that tenuously connects blood flow in the brain to a particular behavior or collection of behaviors (and then ...
My research for Dirty Minds: How Our Brains Influence, Love, Sex, and Relationships wasn’t all orgasms in brain scanners. As I sifted through the scientific literature on love and sex, and interviewed countless neuroscientists, the idea of “risk and reward processing” kept coming up. What I ...
Let me state this upfront: There is no such thing as a “divorce” gene. Not that it stopped many media outlets from reporting that such a gene had been discovered a few weeks ago after Hasse Walum, a scientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and colleagues published a paper in the journal ...
Earlier this year, Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik published an essay entitled, “What’s Wrong With the Teenage Mind?” in the Wall Street Journal. It was a very interesting piece—and one that got all the parents in my circle talking, both about their kids and their own crazy teenage choices ...