“Reading makes us human.”
neuroscience
Posted inEditor's Pick
Ugly Cats and the Loneliness of Man
“‘Pethood’ is a specific lens, one that reveals more about us than it does about the inner lives of the animals we have domesticated.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
I Once Fell for the Fantasy of Uploading Ourselves. It’s a Destructive Vision.
“In the early 2000s, I spent hundreds of hours trying to upload my mind to the web.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The High-Stakes Race to Engineer New Psychedelic Drugs
As the drumbeat of psychedelic drugs’ therapeutic impact grows louder, it’s little surprise that companies are looking for new compounds that can rival psilocybin and LSD — while also being proprietary and patentable. Enter Compass Pathways and their star chemist, Jason Wallach. As John Semley reports for Wired, Wallach’s mad-scientist act is a childhood dream […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Man Who Controls Computers With His Mind
After an accident in 2006, Dennis DeGray became paralyzed from the collarbones down. Eager to participate in experimental research in the area of brain-computer interfaces, DeGray has electrode arrays embedded in his cortex, and is one of a few dozen people in the world who can control various forms of technology with his thoughts. If […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Remarkable Brain of a Carpet Cleaner Who Speaks 24 Languages
Vaughn Smith lives in Maryland. He’s 46 years old. He also learns languages with the seeming ease of a run around the block — including endangered indigenous tongues like Salish. In this fascinating profile that’s part ridealong and part science dive, Jessica Contrera takes you inside the life (and brain) of a man with a […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Night Shifts
“Clearly dreams do something for us,” writes Michael W. Clune. “If not, why would evolution have endowed us with the capacity?” In this essay, Clune explores the fascinating world of dream engineering via a device called the Dormio, which enables a person to shape the images that appear during hypnagogia, the transitional stage between wakefulness […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
What The Mysterious Boredom Divide Teaches Us
Some people are a lot more susceptible to boredom. Why?
Posted inStory
The Final Five Percent
If traumatic brain injuries can impact the parts of the brain responsible for personality, judgment, and impulse control, maybe injury should be a mitigating factor in criminal trials — but one neuroscientist discovers that assigning crime a biological basis creates more issues than it solves.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes, Science & Nature
I Have a Half Mind to Donate My Brain to Science
Dara Bramson’s grandmother decided to donate her brain to science, so Bramson visited the donation center to learn how iot all works.