Centuries of Craving Caffeine, particularly in the form of tea and coffee, has enjoyed a long history of adoration and exaltation the world over, dating back nearly 5000 years to ancient China. When coffee was introduced in Europe in the seventeenth century, its powers of wakefulness were immediately recognized as a fortuitous boon, coming, as…
Of the five senses, taste seems to be the one that we take personally. People will identify themselves as having a “sweet tooth” as opposed to being a “salt junky”. Many cultures are defined on the basis of their traditional cuisine–we often are more familiar with a country’s basic dishes than we are with its…
The human brain. It’s spongy to the touch, weighs about three pounds and looks kind of like a head of cauliflower. Some parts of the brain, including the cerebellum and brain stem, are quite primitive. They help us coordinate our movements and control basic survival functions like breathing. And then there’s the cerebrum—the biggest and…
In a new study published in Psychological Science, neuroscientists Moshe Bar, director of the Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center at Bar-Ilan University and a professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, concluded that the less our minds our loaded the more capacity we have for creative thought. This seems logical, of course, but Dr.…
It’s no secret that teenagers are influenced by their peers. Now, a new study conducted by researchers at UCLA’s Ahmanson–Lovelace Brain Mapping Center looked specifically at how teen brains reacted to “likes” of photos on social media. The main finding was that alarge number of likes resulted in activity across a variety of brain structures.…
An interesting paper came across my radar week – “Placebo effects in cognitive training” published in PNAS (with a paywall, unfortunately). In this paper, the authors investigate the effect that people’s expectations might have on the results of brain-training experiments. Every research study needs to recruit people to participate, and a common way is to…