A team of American and Italian neuroscientists has identified a cellular change in the brain that accompanies obesity. The findings could explain the body’s tendency to maintain undesirable weight levels and identify possible targets for pharmacological efforts to address obesity. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, identify a switch [...]
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by Jerome Busemeyer and Peter Bruza
At a Bloomington, Ind., toy store, kids ages 8 to 12 gather weekly to trade Pokemon cards and share their mutual absorption in the intrigue and adventure of Pokemon. This may seem an unlikely source of material to test theories in cognitive neuroscience. But that is where Indiana University brain scientists Karin Harman James and Tom [...]
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An infamous and ill-fated talking Barbie doll once said, “Math class is tough. Let’s go shopping.” At least until public outcry compelled Mattel to take that 1992 doll off the shelf. Yet that soundtrack still plays for flesh-and-blood girls. The message—that girls do not have the same aptitude or interest as boys in math and [...]
Remember “This is your brain on drugs” being intoned as the egg sizzled away in the pan? It may have been a memorable ad campaign but as a deterrent to drug or alcohol abuse? Not so much. Negatively framed messages may not be an effective way to reach those most in need of persuasion, say [...]
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Distinguished Professor of psychological and brain sciences Robert Nosofsky has won the Warren Medal for breakthrough research on how brains categorize and memorize: in short, how we make sense of the world around us.
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A team of IU Bloomington researchers—led by William P. Hetrick, chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at IU Bloomington–has received a $1.9 million award from the National Institute of Mental Health to study the neurobiological basis of schizophrenia, a psychological disorder affecting approximately 2.4 million U.S. adults. The five-year study, which builds [...]
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NeuroSynth.org is an online platform intended to be a sort of “Google of the brain” for researchers in cognitive neuroscience. The unique system will be designed to learn new concepts, draw inferences, and make discoveries based on collected sources. Indiana University Bloomington cognitive scientist Michael Jones and researchers at the University of Colorado, University of [...]
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Over lunch recently, two friends and I were talking about how to create buzz around a project we’ve been slowly organizing. We talked about emails, news releases, and the like, but we soon realized what we really needed was Facebook. With a set of “friends,” a lot of “liking,” and some strategic “sharing,” we’d be [...]
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