Neuroscience

How we retrieve our knowledge about the world

In order to find our way in the world, we classify it into concepts, such as "telephone." Until now, it was unclear how the brain retrieves these when we only encounter the word and don't perceive the objects directly. Scientists ...

Neuroscience

How does the brain project manage its learning?

The famous patient Henry Molaison (long known as H.M.) suffered damage to his hippocampus after a surgical attempt to cure his epilepsy. As a result, he had anterograde amnesia, which meant that things he learned never made ...

Neuroscience

Reprogramming brain cells enables flexible decision-making

Greetings without handshakes, mandatory masks in trains, sneezing into elbow crooks—the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically illustrates how important it can be for humans to shed habitual behaviors and to learn new ones. Animals, ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Auditory hallucinations rooted in aberrant brain connectivity

Auditory hallucinations, a phenomenon in which people hear voices or other sounds in the absence of external stimuli, are a feature of schizophrenia and some other neuropsychiatric disorders. How they arise in the brain has ...

Neuroscience

Interactive zebrafish brain

If zebrafish larvae used the internet, they might soon be able to download a map of their entire brain. "We're not at that point yet," explains Michael Kunst from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology. "Nevertheless, our ...

Neuroscience

Raw or cooked: This is how we recognise food

Do we see a pear or an apple? The occipital cortex in our brain will activate itself to recognise it. A piece of bread or a nice plate of pasta with sauce? Another region will come into play, called the middle temporal gyrus. ...

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