WHY are we thinking so much about thinking these days? Near the top of best-seller lists around the country, you’ll find Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” followed by Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” and...

Speaking a second language can change everything from problem-solving skills to personality – almost as if you are two people   Cognitive enhancement is just the start. According to some studies, my memories, values, even my personality, may change depending on which language I happen...

When it comes to stimulating creativity, brainstorming is one of the least efficient methods. The idea behind Groupthink models is that creativity and achievement requires other people. Lone geniuses are out, and collaboration is in. Society is snuffing out the potential of introverts –...

Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what parts of the brain are regular internet users using.   This modern age has brought with it a new set of worries. As well as watching our weight and worrying about our souls, we now have...

Using Cognitive Science to Unleash Your Hidden Creativity   Everybody has their own pet theory about how to generate ideas and be productive: some chug caffeine, others relax; some work in groups, others work alone; some work at night, others in the morning. This blog draws from recent...

Investigating what is right or wrong often leads one into territory demarcated as a No-Man’s Land, to places forbidden, to territory thought too harsh, horrible or “dangerous” to explore. I am not smart enough to be a discoverer of these countries, but more a cartographer, mapping out...

Eric Kandel is a titan of modern neuroscience. He won the Nobel Prize in 2000 not simply for discovering a new set of scientific facts (although he has discovered plenty of those), but for pioneering a new scientific approach. As he recounts in his memoir In Search of Memory, Kandel...

Amid the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed...

Blade Runner and the Phillip K. Dick novel that it’s based on have as one of their central themes the philosophically intriguing idea of “implanted” memories. That is, androids “born” days ago could have years and years of memories implanted in them about their lives – lives which...

Neil McLachlan says he wants to do for music what Apple did for the personal computer. For over two decades, the scientist, artist and university professor has worked to increase music participation. “Only five per cent of people (in the West) who go through tertiary music education end up...

Ceaseless Reinvention Leads To Overlapping Solutions   David M. Eagleman, a Neuroscientist, Baylor College of Medicine; Author, Incognito: The Secret Lives of the… For centuries, neuroscience attempted to neatly assign labels to the various parts of the brain: this is the area for...

Researchers probe the neuroscience of creativity, seeing fMRI evidence that our notion of the “divided brain” is indeed mistaken   Painters, designers, architects and other creative individuals are typically thought of as “right-brained.” But a new study from the University of...

Placebo treatments can be effective in treating some conditions by the “self-healing” capabilities of the brain   There’s good evidence showing expectations to get better have significant effects on how patients suffering a variety of ailments feel. This is called the placebo effect...

A familiar scent triggers childhood memories for our brain columnist, prompting him to wonder what is going on in his head   The toy cupboard at my grandmother’s house had a particular smell. I cannot tell you what it was, but sometimes now, as an adult, I will catch a whiff of it....

In one experiment, just telling a man he would be observed by a female was enough to hurt his psychological performance   Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting...

Margaret Moore is the founder and co-director of the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital. Paul Hammerness, MD, is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Together, they hope to get at the physical and psychological roots of chaos. In a recent interview, Moore told Big Think...

“Do you think we should get our brains scanned before getting married?”   It’s not an outrageous question.  It’s the kind of questions that will help us to learn more about how our minds act in the world, while still keeping the world in mind. Technology and science have now...

On the emotional scaffolding of the self, or how the dynamics of temperament fluctuate with social context   What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our...

The brain mechanisms of consciousness are being unravelled at a startling pace, with researchers focusing on eight key areas   Consciousness is at once the most familiar and the most mysterious feature of our existence. A new science of consciousness is now revealing its biological...

Does exercise keep your brain running?   Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and...

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In...

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it would...

Sherlock Holmes’s technique is so elusive not only because it relies on observational mastery that most of us do not possess but in that it also manages to both cast off and exploit one of the most common reasoning fallacies that we are prone to committing: the conjunction fallacy, whereby...

Empathy, a concept originally introduced as Einfühlung by Theodore Lipps, is a state that allows us to share in the experiences and mental states of others. It lets us understand–or at least begin to approximate–their feelings, their internal conditions, their possible thoughts and...

Contextual nature of memory   Our minds respond to cues in our surroundings to retrieve whatever it was that needed retrieving. In other words, we recall information better in the same environment as we stored it–or, in my case, the same environment that triggered the connection–to...

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is on a quest to map brain connections that reveal how our memories and personalities take root.   The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories,...

What’s the Latest Development? Not every idea you have is going to be a winner. That is a rule of the creativity game. Even people hailed as visionaries and geniuses have mediocre output—sometimes it is outright terrible. But new research suggests a trick to identifying your best...

“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” says psychologist Gregory Berns. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes...

Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later. The result: A lot of teenage weirdness. What’s wrong with the teenage mind? How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth...

Hallucinations, Forgotten Faces, and Other Cognitive Quirks   What’s the Big Idea? If seeing is believing, then how do we come to know? One common misperception holds that vision springs directly from the eyes. True, the eyes, ears, and skin bombard us with a constant stream of...

Psychologists are learning that the brain stays agile well into middle age, retaining the ability to learn new skill sets and take on different points of view by building new neural connections. And nothing is more important to maintaining a healthy brain than receiving an education, say...

At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus, decided he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of the country’s best known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a...

MIT neuroscientists explore how longstanding conflict influences empathy for others   MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding...

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages, twenty . . . seventy? Such feats of linguistic prowess provide a glimpse into what the human brain is capable of–and hold up a mirror to our desire to live without language barriers on a...

Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responds: Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet...

You might someday be much, much smarter than you are now. That’s the hope of neuroscientists focused on understanding the basis of intelligence. They have discovered that the brains of people with high IQs tend to be highly integrated, with neural paths connecting distant brain regions,...

Tackling a crossword can crowd the tip of your tongue. You know that you know the answers to 3 Down and 5 Across, but the words just won’t come out. Then, when you’ve given up and moved on to another clue, comes blessed relief. The elusive answer suddenly occurs to you, crystal clear.The...

Many of us subscribe to false beliefs about how our memories work, sometimes with serious consequences   As a lifelong user of human memory, you probably feel you’ve got a good idea of how it works, right? To test your understanding of memory, we compare several commonplace...

A Manifesto for Curiosity Curiosity. We’re all born with it. Albert Einstein dubbed it “holy,” Alistair Cooke called it “free-wheeling intelligence.” It’s that piquing force that nudges us to try it again, explore it some more, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out. From...

What the libraries of yore have to do with today’s information economy and the heart’s will. From Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: “You get your intuition back when you make space for it, when you stop the chattering of the rational mind. The rational...