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Neuroscience in the Courtroom
Scientific American: By a strange coincidence, I was called to jury duty for my very first time shortly after I started as director of a new MacArthur Foundation project exploring the issues that neuroscience raises
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The Brain Is Not an Explanation
Brain scans pinpoint how chocoholics are hooked. This headline appeared in The Guardian a couple years ago above a science story that began: “Chocoholics really do have chocolate on the brain.” The story went on
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Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist
The New York Times: The Intel Science Talent Search is considered the nation’s most elite and demanding high school research competition, attracting the crème de la milk-fats-encased-in-a-phospholipid-and-protein-membrane of aspiring young scientists. Victors and near-victors in
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Revealing the Wiring that Allows Us to Adapt to the Unexpected
Wouldn’t life be easy if everything happened as we anticipated? Luckily we have the orbitofrontal cortex, the area of the brain that adapts to the unexpected to make and monitor predictions about the world. Patients
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Reflections on Mirror Neurons
In 1992, a team at the University of Parma, Italy discovered what have been termed “mirror neurons” in macaque monkeys: cells that fire both when the monkey took an action (like holding a banana) and
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Talk Therapy May Help Treat Social Anxiety
WebMD: A 12-week course of talk therapy, when used to treat social anxiety disorder, produces changes in the electrical activity of the brain, according to new research. The findings appear in Psychological Science. Symptoms of
