Category Archives: Cognition

June 11

Technicalities of the Tingles: The science of sounds that feel good. #ASMR

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“I wanted someone speaking in lightly accented English. And I wanted them talking to me about jewelry, slowly and deliberately.” — Andrea Seigel, This American Life #491: Tribes (aired March 29, 2013) Now that NeuWriteSD’s gender month is over, I thought I’d ease our readers back into the usual routine with a scientifically-stimulating but slightly […]

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April 02

Of Batteries and Brains: Self-Help with tDCS

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A Gratuitous Freudian Introduction When the renowned (if controversial) psychoanalyst and crayfish neurobiologist Sigmund Freud exclaimed that “Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God” [1], he was concerned that fast technological progress, while enabling us to modify and control the world around us to a magnificent degree, also made us ill-adjusted […]

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January 22

Present you vs. Future you

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It’s almost the end of January. How are your New Year’s Resolutions holding up? If you haven’t stuck to them, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in the majority. There are many reasons we don’t meet our well-intentioned goals to go to the gym more, quit smoking, or go to bed earlier at night. One […]

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December 04

Hearing voices: Social context influences psychosis

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“People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.” These are the words of John Nash, Jr., the Nobel Laureate who inspired the book and the movie A Beautiful Mind and […]

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October 02

Lithium: Wonder Drug? Part I

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I’m so happy ’cause today I’ve found my friends They’re in my head What comes to mind when you hear the word lithium? A drug used to manage life-threatening mood disorders? A potentially deadly toxin? A chemical found in trace amounts in many compounds in nature? (Or maybe just the Nirvana song?) Any of these […]

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September 25

Why we LOL

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Humor is a difficult concept to articulate. We might not always know why things are funny, but we do tend to know what kinds of things are funny. It comes in many forms, and general consensus is that things like videos of treadmill mishaps, cynical comics and corny puns are funny. Luckily, there’s a pretty large […]

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August 22

How Does Exercise Improve the Brain?

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When I started college, my best friend and I started a regular workout schedule to evade the infamous freshman fifteen. The odds were already out of my favor when I started to work at the dining hall right next to my freshman dorm. We were not as intense as Olympic runner Allyson Felix pictured above. […]

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August 14

Let’s Talk About Sleep

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Oh no.  It’s 4am, and I’ve done it again.  Ugh.  I’ve waited until the last minute to write my NeuWriteSD post, and now it’s 4am.  And I haven’t slept since 5am yesterday morning.  Ugh. As you might imagine, I’m feeling pretty terrible.  Not only because of the guilt (since I was supposed to have this […]

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July 04

Does Tourette’s Syndrome help Tim Howard?

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For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past fortnight, the FIFA World Cup has been on. Unfortunately the US Men’s team was knocked out by Belgium in extra time on Tuesday, but if one man can hold his head high it is Tim Howard. The US goalkeeper made a […]

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May 22

Consciousness in your dreams?

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“A dream is a short-lasting psychosis, and a psychosis is a long-lasting dream.” -Arthur Schopenhauer Dreaming has entranced thinkers from the beginning of recorded history, and it’s easy to see why. Both Socrates and Plato agreed that dreaming is a total abandonment of reason. More contemporaneously, no less than Kant and Schopenhauer identified dreaming as […]

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