Cognition

“Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain”

“If you’re feeling overwhelmed, there’s a reason: The processing capacity of the conscious mind is limited. This is a result of how the brain’s attentional system evolved. Our brains have two dominant modes of attention: the task-positive network and the…

“The brain performs feats of math to make sense of the world”

“The researchers found that our brains can accurately track the likelihood of several different explanations for what we see around us. They traced these abilities to a region of the brain located just behind our eyes known…

“Your Brain Is On the Brink of Chaos”

“Two simple pendulums that swing with perfect regularity can, when yoked together, move in a chaotic trajectory. Given that the billions of neurons in our brain are each like a pendulum, oscillating back and forth between resting and firing, and connected to…

“Smell and Cognitive Development”

“the most polymorphic CNV-enriched [olfactory receptor (OR)] cluster in the human genome, located on chr 15q11.2, is … associated with two well-known mental retardation syndromes. As olfaction represents the primitive cognition in most mammals, arguably in competition…

“Why words get stuck on the tip of your tongue, and how to stop it recurring”

“Psychologists studying this phenomenon say it occurs when there is a disconnect between a word’s concept and it’s lexical representation. A successful utterance requires these two steps are…

“Picture This? Some Just Can’t”

“The scientists showed names to MX and asked him to picture their faces. In normal brains, some of those face-recognition regions again become active. In MX’s brain, none of them did.

Paradoxically, though, MX could answer questions that would seem…