In William Shakespeare’s comedy Merchant of Venice, the play’s heroine Portia sings: Tell me where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head. If you look at Valentine’s Day cards, it’s clear fancy…
Fears about air travel are common and entirely understandable. Human beings have not evolved to fly (beyond the fact that we have evolved brains sophisticated enough to invent aircraft). In an alien environment…
Hi Mum … or should I say … impostor?
Aaron Tait/Flickr
In the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers aliens invade earth by replicating individuals. While the idea that we could be duped by shape-shifting aliens is a great idea for a film, the story echoes a…
The tragic 200-year folly of the Crusades attests to the power of culture to shape and sustain strongly held ‘personal’ beliefs.
Gustave Doré (1832-1883), Crusade against the Moors of Granada/Wikimedia Commons
There is no gene for bigotry. Bigots are not born, they are made by the people and the society around them. Our brains and minds are shaped by culture. To quote a great American linguist, Edward Sapir…
How do three little punctuation marks convey emotion?
Veronica Belmont
We may not spend a lot of time thinking about the emoticons we insert into our emails and text messages, but it turns out that they reveal something interesting about the way we perceive facial expressions…
Nuts about beer: spraying tiny tastes of beer on men’s tongues was enough to trigger a brain response that made them want to drink more.
Flickr/Dinner Series
Liz Minchin, The Conversation e Carley Tonoli, The Conversation
Even the tiniest taste of beer can be enough to drive some men to want to drink more, a new study has found. While it sounds like the kind of study dreamt up at a backyard barbeque, US researchers have…
A woman reads the Sydney Morning Herald in its new tabloid-sized format while a neuro test monitors her reaction.
Fairfax/AAP
If there’s one thing that could be observed from Fairfax’s move to publish its first tabloid-sized broadsheets it was a surprising level of neuro-illiteracy. Fairfax’s head of advertising, Sarah Keith…
Neuroscience is used to explain everything from sexual attraction to voting habits to why we buy particular products.
Flickr/mutsmuts
In May last year, a new attraction called The Ascent opened for a brief season in Brooklyn, New York. Described as “part art installation, part adventure ride and part spiritual journey,” The Ascent consisted…
We recognise extreme emotions, but may need more than facial expressions to decode them.
How Hwee young/EPA
As social creatures, non-verbal communication through facial expression is important in portraying emotions – and because of this, it’s interpreted rapidly and accurately. Regardless of culture, defined…