What determines being left or right handed? As a scientific question might seem irrelevant, but actually handedness is a good example of a brain phenomenon called lateralization which basically refers to the location of certain brain activities in one brain hemisphere or the other (for example, language areas are located in the left hemisphere). There […]
Sleep is a naturally recurring state of mind and body characterized by altered consciousness, relatively repressed sensory inputs, inhibition of nearly all voluntary muscles, and reduced interactions with surroundings. We spend around one third of our lives sleeping although why we sleep is still theme of debate. Sleep seems to assist animals with improvements in […]
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, knowledge, etc.— to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that may be different to ourselves. Attributing thoughts to others allows one to predict or explain their actions, and to posit their intentions. It enables one […]
Music is usually considered as a universal art form. It is found in virtually all human cultures and its use is associated with many different human tasks, from the most sacred to the most profane. Its elusive nature has haunted thinkers for millennia. Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoras, among others, devoted much of their time to […]
Improvisation is a hallmark of jazz music, arguably its most salient feature. When they improvise, musicians compose and play simultaneously, one of the most notorious examples of spontaneous creativity. What happens in the brain during improvisation is largely a mystery, but studying it may help us gain some insight on the basis that underlie the […]
It is a crystalline description of how stubborn mental biases can be. Perhaps Albert Einstein, the alleged author, would have agreed with the proverb: “ it is harder to crack a prejudice than an atom ”. But ironically and paradoxically, it hides itself a bias behind. Einstein likely never said the sentence. Why so many […]
A review of the book: The brain electric: The dramatic high-tech rage to merge minds and machines by Malcolm Gay Flying cars, self-tying shoes or a fully functional hoverboard are only a few examples of the inventions which, according to the time-travel adventure sequel Back to the Future Part II, should be available for purchase […]
More than a hundred years have passed since the German physicist Alois Alzheimer associated the traits of dementia of one of her patients with morphological changes in her brain after her death. While we know a great deal about what today is known as Alzheimer’s disease, we still need to answer two fundamental questions: what […]
Metacognition is «cognition about cognition», or «knowing about knowing». It comes from the root word «meta», meaning beyond, and the word «cognition» that includes all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge: attention, memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning, biological computation, problem-solving, decision making, comprehension and production of language, etc. Metacognition can take many forms; it […]
Back in 2001, the Human Genome Project gave us a complete readout of our DNA, unraveling that magic sequence of As, Gs, Cs, and Ts that contained all the information for making one of us. Thanks to that, we now know that in that sequence only 1.5% has information to make proteins, a fact that […]