Category Archives: Cognition

September 26

The Appeal of a Limitless Mind

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With its slick visuals, wry narration, and unflinching action, the movie Limitless is undeniably fun—just throw in the hunky Bradley Cooper, and you’ve got instant box office gold.  Somehow, the only thing Hollywood forgot to include is more accurate neuroscience…

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September 13

Reading is Weird

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How do humans learn how to read? Reading is a much more recent development compared to spoken language, with the development of written language typically placed around 3200 BCE in Egypt (1). Some have termed this development a cultural invention because we were able to gain a new ability to understand meaning from written characters, […]

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August 29

Ye Olde Neuroimaging

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Technology has rocketed neuroscience forward since the middle of the 20th century. From probing single cells to recording from the entire brain at once, longstanding questions from the past can be answered with the turn of a few knobs and the push of a few buttons. None of the tools in neuroscience are more familiar, […]

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August 22

Sensorimotor cortex reorganization: a ghost story

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Ugh … not again. The all-too-familiar pain appears in your hand. The muscles cramp and the crushing pressure mounts. Nothing you do alleviates the ache, and the longer it persists, the more intolerable it becomes. You try with all your might to unclench it, move it to any other position. But, as in those nightmares […]

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August 15

On Being Handed

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There’s a box of matches on the table in front of you. You pick up the box, choose a match, and strike it against the side of the box. Which hand did you use to strike the match? Chances are, you used your right hand. According to most estimates, roughly 90% of the human population […]

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June 24

When shown a picture of a middle-aged male…

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   When shown a picture of a middle-aged male actor, how is it that we can easily tell Matt Damon from Mark Wahlberg? The actual differences in their faces are not huge in absolute terms, though it feels obvious when looking at them. Faces are all pretty much the same: two eyes, a mouth, a […]

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June 18

Do monkeys play fair? Staging an ultimatum game in the ultimate social primate

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Every now and then, my roommate will lean in the frame of my door and pose a simple scenario: “Will you mop the floors if I wash the dishes?” I usually respond positively to the ultimatum (I really can’t stand doing dishes), and when the moment is right, put on some Enya and graciously clean […]

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June 10

Impaired interval timing and Free Willy (not really)

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This is really about:  The role of interval timing dysfunction in the formation of first-rank symptoms in patients with schizophrenia? Note 1: This is the first in a “series” of posts by the second- (or third-?) year students to tell you a little about our minor prop topics.  We all Some of us worked very hard on our […]

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Joaquín Fuster: Working Memory, Cognits, and the Perception-Action Cycle

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In the 1920s, Jakob von Uexküll (the theorist responsible for the notion of umwelt) described the sensory-motor cycle through which an animal modifies the environment, thereby modifying its own perception of the environment, which leads to further action upon the environment, and so forth, until a particular goal is achieved (Fig. 1a).   In the primitive animal, […]

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