The Strange and Secret Ways That Animals Perceive the World

Nonhuman creatures have senses that we’re just beginning to fathom. What would they tell us if we could only understand them?

This Optical Illusion Has a Revelation About Your Brain and Eyes (Published 2022)

Your pupils may be dilating when you see images like this one as your brain tries to anticipate the near future.

The Neuroscience Behind Bad Decisions | Quanta Magazine

Irrationality may be a consequence of the brain’s ravenous energy needs.

How the Brain 'Constructs' the Outside World

Neural activity probes your physical surroundings to select just the information needed to survive and flourish

The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark

The tools we use to help us think—from language to smartphones—may be part of thought itself.

3D-printed acoustic holograms against Alzheimer's or Parkinson's

The holograms designed by the team of researchers from UPV and CSIC allow the opening of the blood brain barrier selectively, efficiently and in a highly focused manner, facilitating the administration of therapeutic drugs to treat pathologies that affect the central nervous…

Why We Remember Music and Forget Everything Else

Psychologists say it's no surprise that we have such a strong memory for music and can easily recall lyrics and melodies, even if we haven’t heard them in years.

How Sugar Affects the Brain, According to a Neuroscience Expert

Not surprisingly, you need sugar to function—but cravings are actually a result of too much.

Everything We See Is a Mash-up of the Brain’s Last 15 Seconds of Visual Information

The brain is basically a time machine that ensures what we see is stable and continuous.

Weber’s Law - NeuroLogica Blog

I confess I have never heard (or at least don't remember ever hearing) about Weber's Law (pronouned vayber) until reading about it with this news item. It is the Law of Just Noticeable Differences. It deals with the minimum difference in a stimulus necessary to notice. While…

Design Psychology and the Neuroscience of Awesome UX | Toptal®

Human cognition is complex, and many factors play into instant impressions. Design psychology is coming to the forefront as more and more companies are using neuroscience to design better user experiences. Great user experience design isn’t magic—it’s science.

Neuroscience: Music, silence, and prediction

For the first time, the authors of a recent study isolated the electrical neural signals of prediction by studying moments of silence in music.

New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviors

Rapid advances in large-scale connectomics are beginning to spotlight the importance of individual variations in the neural circuitry. They also highlight the limitations of “wiring diagrams” alone.

Brain scans look stunning, but what do they actually mean? | Psyche Ideas

Functional brain scans are a valuable tool but their meaning must be interpreted with caution and scepticism

The Odor of Things, by Scott Sayare

Solving the mysteries of scent

Brain Damage Saved His Music - Issue 20: Creativity - Nautilus

After a chunk of his brain was removed, guitarist Pat Martino got his groove back.

Organ transplant patients (maybe) don’t get dementia. Here’s why. – Trevor

How Bionic Gloves Gave a Maestro Pianist His Hands Back

A lifetime of brutal injuries and misfortune robbed the world-renowned pianist João Carlos Martins of the ability to play his instrument. And then along came an eccentric designer and his bionic gloves.

The last great mystery of the mind: meet the people who have unusual – or non-existent – inner voices

Does your internal monologue play out on a television, in an attic, as a bickering Italian couple – or is it entirely, blissfully silent?

Researchers analyzed 700-plus songs known to give people chills. Here’s the

Researchers studying chills-inducing music inadvertently created an epic, multi-genre list of songs that ought to give you goosebumps. We made a Spotify playlist from it.

Books – Anil Seth

Our brains exist in a state of “controlled hallucination”

Three new books lay bare the weirdness of how our brains process the world around us.

The miracle molecule that could treat brain injuries and boost your fading memory

Discovered more than a decade ago, a remarkable compound shows promise in treating everything from Alzheimer’s to brain injuries—and it just might improve your cognitive abilities.

“I understand what joy is now”: An MDMA trial participant tells his story

One patient in a pioneering trial describes his “life-changing” experience with the psychoactive drug.

Hit songs rely on increasing “harmonic surprise” to hook listeners, study f

Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” ranked highest in challenging musical expectations.

Focusing on Blue - 10 Projects

Why it took us thousands of years to see the colour violet | Psyche Ideas

The colour violet was largely missing from art before the Impressionists, and is seen differently by different cultures. Why?

Tomorrow Edition - The Agony and the Ecstasy of Deep Brain Stimulation Surg

What deep brain stimulation surgery feels like.

Does the Rorschach Inkblot Test Really Work?

Learn about the Rorschach inkblot test, a type of projective assessment in which subjects look at 10 ambiguous inkblot images and say what they see in the image.

A Lucid, Literary Illustration of the Complex, Beautiful Work of Memory

In “A Sense of Self,” the psychiatrist Veronica O’Keane flashes narrative skill in exploring the science and mystery of memory.

The blind woman who switched personalities and could suddenly see | The Sta

It’s All in Your Head review – enduring mystery of psychosomatic illness |

Suzanne O’Sullivan’s excellent book reveals that medicine remains as much an art as a science

Neuroscience may have a part in why you're playing Taylor Swift's songs on

Taylor Swift literally has music down to a science

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat - Wikipedia

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales is a 1985 book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing the case histories of some of his patients. Sacks chose the title of the book from the case study of one of his patients who has visual agnosia, a neurological…

Juxting – A Fountain of Ideas

This is an article about juxting — coming up with ideas by randomly juxtaposing two things and seeing the ways they could relate to each…

How does the brain interpret computer languages?

Neuroscientists detect a distinct brain network that grows stronger with practice.

Scientists Analyzed 24,000 Chess Matches to Understand Cognition

Chess could perhaps be the ultimate window through which we might see how our mental powers shift during our lives.

How the Brain Responds to Beauty

Scientists search for the neural basis of an enigmatic experience

The Ultimate Experience: A Guide to the Principles of Sensory Design

Digital design routinely ignores neurological factors beyond sight. Sensory design principles emphasize the interconnection of human perception and prompt designers to explore non-visual solutions. #design #ux #marketing #art #science #innovation

There’s an “Inverse Piano” in Your Head

A Kavli Prize–winning scientist details the magic of transforming vibrations into sound in the inner ear.

A concept in psychology is helping AI to better navigate our world | MIT Te

The concept: When we look at a chair, regardless of its shape and color, we know that we can sit on it. When a fish is in water, regardless of its location, it knows that it can swim. This is known as the theory of affordance, a term coined by psychologist James J. Gibson. It…

Your Brain Chooses What to Let You See

Beneath our awareness, the brain lets certain kinds of stimuli automatically capture our attention by lowering the priority of the rest.

Blindsight: A Strange Neurological Condition Could Help Explain Consciousness

Some blind people seem to be able to see without being conscious of it.

From fluffy to valuable: How the brain recognises objects

To recognise a chair or a dog, our brain separates objects into their individual properties and then puts them back together. Until recently, it has remained unclear what these properties are. Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in…

The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces

Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.

Prosopagnosia: The artist in search of her face

Carlotta is a prolific self portrait artist from Munich with prosopagnosia - face blindness.

Why Red Means Red in Almost Every Language

The confounding consistency of color categories.

If language began in the hands, why did it ever leave? | Aeon Essays

If language began with gestures around a campfire and secret signals on hunts, why did speech come to dominate communication?

Why line-dried laundry smells so good

Why does laundry that dries outdoors in the sunshine smell so nice? Researchers conducted an experiment to find out.

Imagining vs Seeing | NeuroLogica Blog

Try to conjure up a mental image of a bicycle (without referencing a picture). Better yet, try to draw a bicycle. Most people (75% or more) cannot draw an accurate bicycle from memory. There are a lot of layers here. First, people tend to grossly overestimate their specific or…