“We see with the eyes, but we see with the brain as well, and seeing with the brain is often called ‘imagination,’ and we are familiar with the landscapes of our own imagination, our ‘inscapes,’ we’ve lived with them all our lives. But there are also hallucinations as well, and hallucinations are completely different…they seem to come from the outside, and to mimic perception.” With those words, world-famous neurologist Oliver Sacks begins a fascinating twenty-minute talk on hallucination, which you can watch in its entirety below. Sacks is well-known for his work in neurology, and you’ve probably seen the movie Awakenings (starring Robin WIlliams as a character based on Sacks) — that film was based on the true story of how Sacks discovered how to revive catatonic patients with a new drug called L-Dopa. Anyway, back to today’s Sacks talk.Discussed: visual hallucinations among the visually impaired, hallucinations as “a rather boring movie,” Charles Bonnett syndrome, handsome young men

Test yourself and help us learn more about the mind and brain.

Now that on-the-job experimentation has taken an academic turn. A couple of years ago, Teller joined a coterie of illusionists and tricksters recruited by Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, to look at the neuroscience of magic. Last summer, that work culminated in an article for the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience called "Attention and Awareness in Stage Magic." Teller was one of the coauthors, and its publication was a signal event in a field some researchers are calling magicology, the mining of stage illusions for insights into brain function.

Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Researchers at North Carolina State University have found that senior citizens who think older people should perform poorly on tests of memory actually score much worse than seniors who do not buy in to negative stereotypes about aging and memory loss.

Try it for yourself. My perception of intentionality isn't 'normal.'

In a scientific study of healthy, older adults ages 59 to 83, Harvard medical scientists found that study participants who regularly drank a cocoa flavanol-rich beverage made using the Mars, Incorporated Cocoapro® process had an eight percent increase in brain blood flow after one week, and 10 percent increase after two weeks.

Humans have an in-built ability to do mathematics even if they do not have the language to express it, a research team has suggested.

The data showed that when the cell phone was transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha waves in the person's brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneat

A really beautiful article illuminating that which I've always thought: autism is not a disorder.

A discussion of qualia among other things.

APPARENTLY PEOPLE LIKE DOING STIMULANTS

A group of musical cognitive scientists.

In a notion taken from science fiction afficionados, University of Arizona researchers presented a robot that moves by using the brain impulses of a moth at the 37th annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego.

The brain uses this biological trick because there is no way for all of its neurons to connect with and interact with every other neuron. It is still an expensive task for the hippocampus to make all of those connections. The retrieval tags the hippocampu

The reason why even professional basketball and soccer players sometimes miss an easy shot may be partly explained by spontaneous fluctuations of electrical activity within the brain, a study suggests.

In this symposium, nine researchers in computer science, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, and molecular biology address Penrose's positions at some length, concentrating on his Gödelian arguments against artificial intelligence and on his proposal th

Almost every article on Wain uses them to demonstrate the progression of schizophrenia but the evidence for them being painted in chronological order is actually quite weak.

WELCOME to [wu:riddles]! This is an archive of problems I've been collecting since the Spring of 2002. They come from many places, including word of mouth, college courses, books, and job interviews for hi-tech positions. Many are even written by members

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan ... all » Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led

This page contains very rough drafts of the notes upon which Professor Busemeyer based his Quantum Tutorial presented at Cognitive Science 2007.

Here you can download PDF files that will allow you to print out some choice illustrations from The Accidental Mind in notecard format.  Print, fold and enjoy!  Illustrations by Joan M.K. Tycko.

A fantastic research page from a cognitive scientist studying under Doug Hofstadter.

An ABC Radio National look into the left and right brain.

The first commercial brain-computer interface.

An interactive zoomable map of the brain with over 50 terabytes of data.

Article describing neurogenesis and how it is used in the brain, based on a paper by Kee, Teixeira, Wang and Frankland published in Nature Neuroscience.

A Default mode of the brain function of Britney Spears

In 1953, radical brain surgery was used on a patient with severe epilepsy. The operation on "H.M." worked, but left him with almost no long-term memory. H.M. is now in his 80s. His case has helped scientists understand much more about the brain.

A look inside the brains of fucked-up mice.

They sell resin castings of brain casings from a wide variety of animals, both modern and extinct. These endocasts are made here in our workshop, pulled from original molds we've made from the inside of the skull.

Some interesting optical illusions to fuck with your head.

A -HUGE- database of brain images, full resolution fMRI scans, Nissl stains, frozen cross sections, etc. all browsable via a nifty interface.

A large collection of images and movies depicting the brain in the skull.

A huge site dedicated to being an atlas to the entire brain. They have awesome interactive javascript applications that show the whole brain in a variety of neural imaging techniques.

A plasma-filled brain lamp! I want!

A beautiful walkthrough of the neurobiology going on when you do drugs. I'm lovin' it.

A "data cable" made from stretched nerve cells could someday help connect computers to the human nervous system.

fMRI scans reveal that the same part of the brain used when recalling the past is used when contemplating the future.

A Scientific American article about stimulating the brain, via TMS and amphetamines.

These connections between nerve cells in our brain, which are regularly passing chemical messages back and forth, also supposedly have our memories distributed across them. Yet, regardless of the perpetual exchange of molecules, our memories remain stable

Amazing psychedelic art by Alex Grey.

Wheelchairs + neural implants.

An article describing the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Paul Allen's new venture. There's also links to a brain modeling program.

Another lay article concerning the "shadow self" manifest after stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction.

An hour long view of some juicy brainhacking.

Sixty-six optical illusions (mostly java)

Welcome to the Fifth Edition of Encephalon, a neuroscience blog carnival.

And I quote, "This system "guides the precise delivery of targeted transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) pulses to discrete brain areas." It is today the only device available for accurate prediction of the TMS stimulus location and dose within the huma

A neurologist studying people with hydrocephalus found that half of his most severe cases had IQs greater than 100, even though they had 95% of their cranial cavity filled with cerebrospinal fluid. One of them was a student who had an IQ of 126 and had a

A sleeping pill seems to temporarily revive people in a vegetative state.

Stephen Wiltshire takes a helicopter flight over Rome. He then proceeds to draw it. The whole thing.

A new way of recording ERPS: EROS, the fiber optic helmet. Wow. Sadly, it doesn't work on deep brain structures.

A test determining your autism spectrum quotient. I scored a 19, but I am suspected to have mild Aspurger's.

An awesome mind grenade ringer t-shirt.

From the article: Self-awareness, regarded as a key element of being human, is switched off when the brain needs to concentrate hard on a tricky task, found the neurobiologists from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

Many people are interested in what is called neurofeedback or EEG biofeedback training, a generic mental training method which makes the trainee consciously aware of the general activity in the brain. This method shows great potential for improving many m

Researchers say the mind can be strengthened with regular training and rigorous practice. Here's a sample brain warm-up for a quick mental recharge. If you feel you're a bit sluggish, try repeating similar exercises daily to get your brain back in shape.