Attention to the Unseen

Ed Yong writes: Carl Schoonover and Andrew Fink are confused. As neuroscientists, they know that the brain must be flexible but not too flexible. It must rewire itself in the face of new experiences, but must also consistently represent the features of the external world. How? The relatively simple explanation found in neuroscience textbooks is that specific groups of neurons reliably fire when their owner smells a rose, sees a sunset, or hears a bell. These representations—these patterns of neural…

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Christopher Comer and Ashley Taggart write: In the 21st century, neuroscience has been able to extend our understanding of the brain beyond brain anatomy to an increasingly functional view of cognition. Every year brings new insights on memory and imagination, and reveals often surprising areas of convergence with fields such as anthropology and philosophy. Yet it was a Cambridge professor of literature, almost a century ago in the aftermath of World War I, who pioneered a view of cognition we…

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Alysson Muotri writes: When I moved from Brazil to the United States to train as a neuroscientist, I was shocked to discover that most of our ‘knowledge’ about the human brain in fact came from another species: the mouse. This struck me as pretty strange. After all, it wasn’t the mouse brain that put us on the Moon or that decoded the human genome. It was the human brain in all its complexity that generated our understanding of life and…

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Jordana Cepelewicz writes: During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory. But to accomplish this, the brain has to…

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Lisa Feldman Barrett writes: As a neuroscientist, I see scientific myths about the brain repeated regularly in the media and corners of academic research. Three of them, in particular, stand out for correction. After all, each of us has a brain, so it’s critical to understand how that three-pound blob between your ears works. Myth number one is that specific parts of the human brain have specific psychological jobs. According to this myth, the brain is like a collection of…

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Jason Castro writes: Pursued by poets and artists alike, beauty is ever elusive. We seek it in nature, art and philosophy but also in our phones and furniture. We value it beyond reason, look to surround ourselves with it and will even lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Our world is defined by it, and yet we struggle to ever define it. As philosopher George Santayana observed in his 1896 book The Sense of Beauty, there is within us “a…

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NPR reports: If you fall off a bike, you’ll probably end up with a cinematic memory of the experience: the wind in your hair, the pebble on the road, then the pain. That’s known as an episodic memory. And now researchers have identified cells in the human brain that make this sort of memory possible, a team reports in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The cells are called time cells, and they place a sort of…

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