Despite its huge complexity, your brain directs its neural traffic in relatively straightforward ways when approaching cognitively demanding tasks such as puzzles.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for teens in America. But there may be ways to study the stress response and figure out who is most at risk.
Brain functions integrate and compress multiple components of an experience, including sight and smell – which simply can’t be handled in the way computers sense, process and store data.
These tiny nanoparticles might provide a new way to see what’s happening in the brain and even deliver treatments to specific cells – if researchers figure out how to use them safely and effectively.
Honeybees are good at maths, but it was thought they could only count to four. That is, unless you present them with a task in which they are punished with a bitter-tasting drink for getting it wrong.
Conversion therapy has been pushed on some in the LGBQ community by those who think same-sex sexual behavior is ‘unnatural.’ But such behavior seems to have evolved millions of years before humans.
Sections in the brain called “senders” and “receivers” are responsible for directing neural traffic, and we are now a step closer to understanding how they work.
Like a cocktail partygoer able to focus on one discussion in a noisy room, brains are able to make reliable connections against a busy neural background. Here are two phenomena that help it happen.
BMIs like the ones Neuralink is working on are already used in laboratories around the world as assistive technologies. But melding your mind with an AI is probably not happening anytime soon.
Our brains create new memories, and forget old ones, by forging and breaking connections between nerve cells. Now researchers can do something similar using a light-sensitive electronic chip.
Finding out more about how the brain works could help programmers translate thinking from the wet and squishy world of biology into all-new forms of machine learning in the digital world.