Author: Rachel Gordon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology In 1994, Florida jewelry designer Diana Duyser discovered what she believed to be the Virgin Mary’s image in a grilled cheese sandwich, which she preserved and later auctioned for $28,000. But how much do we really understand about pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing faces and patterns in objects […]
Electroencephalography, or EEG, was invented 100 years ago. In the years since the invention of this device to monitor brain electricity, it has had an incredible impact on how scientists study the human brain. Since its first use, the EEG has shaped researchers’ understanding of cognition, from perception to memory. It has also been important […]
Pain is highly personal. What to some doesn’t even deserve the name, for others can be unbereable. Now, we just discovered a difference in how we feel it: men and women have different pain receptors. Recent research has demonstrated in rodents and, importantly, primates including humans, that there are sex differences in pain receptors, also […]
One of the things I mostly hated in school was having to practise my calligraphy skills, I found it monotonous and uninspiring. However, despite not having served to improve my handwriting, it may have helped me fixate new information during my studies, as new research points towards handwriting being better than typing for learning and […]
Authors: Elissa-Marie Cocquyt, speech therapist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen & Adrià Rofes, assistant professor of Neurolinguistics at the University of Groningen. The human brain is one of the most wonderful organs. In general, our brain consists of a left and right part, of which the outermost layer is called the ‘cortex’ […]
Music is not only a pleasure for our brains, it seems that learning it at an old age can help prevent grey matter loss. This non-medicinal intervention would be a very interesting way of delaying the onset of dementia and loss of cognitive abilities associated with ageing. Recently, a team of researchers recruited a group […]
Biochemistry • Biomedicine • Health • Medicine • Neuroscience
Recent research has demonstrated that obesity impairs the mechanisms that allow our brains to realize when our stomachs are full and that these changes are maintained despite dieting, giving insights into why it is difficult for obese people to avoid excessive eating and why there is often a yo-yo effect after dieting. It has been […]
SARS-CoV-2 Author: José R. Pineda got his Ph.D. from University of Barcelona in 2006. Since 2007 he has worked for Institut Curie and The French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. Currently he is a researcher of the UPV/EHU. He investigates the role of stem cells in physiologic and pathologic conditions. With 676.609.955 cases registered […]
Mental illness is associated with accelerated ageing, namely with shorter life span and ageing-related diseases such as diabetes or cardiovascular problems, with worse effects observed in men than women (the average lifespan for men having suffered from mental illness is 10 years shorter than for peers without those issues, for women the difference is seven […]
While for long in neuroscience, computers were used to model brain function, organoid intelligence, a new scientific field, aims to do the opposite by developing biological computers which would benefit from the efficiency of our most complex biological machine: the brain. Fear not. The objective is not to connect humans by their brains to power […]