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August 25, 2010
General brain circuits process moral decisions as readily as they do everyday choices. 
August 24, 2010
Archaeologist and anthropologist Timothy Taylor explains how a long-vanished artefact explains human evolution and led to "survival of the weakest."
August 24, 2010
Many animals yelp or cry out when they're in pain. But as far as scientists can tell, we humans seem to be the only species that shed tears for emotional reasons.
August 17, 2010
The most beautiful thing about humans is that they are both ever-changing and sometimes prone to error. Yet humans are still extremely flexible and adaptable, managing the transition from one context to another almost seamlessly.
August 12, 2010
Most of us do it every day without even thinking about it, yet talking is a uniquely human ability.
August 11, 2010
Humans aren't the only ones that make irrational choices; new research has found single-celled brain-less slime moulds do it too.
August 9, 2010
From one perspective, the human brain is a masterpiece. From another, it's 3 pounds of inefficient jelly. Both views are accurate.
August 6, 2010
For generations, the Avidians have been cloning themselves quietly in a box. They're not perfect, but most of their mutations go unnoticed. Then something remarkable happens.
August 4, 2010
By examining DNA, we can plot the bumpy ride followed by humanity to today's astonishingly populous position.
August 3, 2010
Of all the things that make human beings unique, one that gets overlooked—literally—is the shoulder.
August 2, 2010
How and why we went from small-brained, raw-food eating primates to carnivorous, large-brained cooks.
August 2, 2010
The sway that exaggerated characteristics hold over us is a special kind of illusion—and a powerful one. They help to drive the most powerful force that shapes life on earth: evolution.
July 26, 2010
You could say human evolution started when the first brave ape came down from the trees. But scientists have long said that it was making tools that really set humans apart.
July 26, 2010
Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past. But in the last few years, biologists have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years.
July 26, 2010
It's no secret to any dog- or cat-lover that humans have a special connection with animals, but this human-animal connection goes well beyond simple affection.
July 16, 2010
There is one sex-specific gene so vital, its function has remained unaltered throughout evolution and is found in almost all animals.
July 16, 2010
According to one controversial evolutionary theory, early humans developed a taste for cooked food around 2 million years ago, and this set in motion a series of changes that made us utterly different from any other animal.
July 14, 2010
Learning to read requires the brain's visual system to undergo profound changes, including unlearning the ancient ability to recognise an object and its mirror image as identical.
July 6, 2010
We may not have as much conscious control over our actions and behaviour as we think, suggesting many of our decisions may be made without our conscious knowledge.
July 5, 2010
Extroverts are born not made—or at least, that's what they say. But what if it's more subtle than that? What if we tailor our personalities to our surroundings to make the most of our genes?
July 5, 2010
It took him years of searching in the Canadian Arctic, but in 2004, Neil Shubin found the fossilized remains of what he thinks is one of our most important ancestors.
July 1, 2010
A study by has found a link between killer whales, pilot whales and humans—the only three known species where females stop breeding relatively early in their lifespan.
June 29, 2010
Forget macho or metrosexual, men should be split into two types of apes—aggressive chimps or peace loving bonobos'
June 29, 2010
Religious beliefs date back at least 100,000 years. And such beliefs persist today, with the vast majority of modern humans in every corner of the globe espousing some kind of religious conviction. But why?
June 18, 2010
Rats, and possibly humans too, rely on three kinds of neuron to navigate: direction cells fire when an animal faces a specific direction; place cells fire in a specific location and only that location; and grid cells fire at regular intervals as the animal moves trough space, creating something like an internal grid for their world.
June 16, 2010
A study has found that a mechanism exists within the human brain that enables both men and women to determine the strength and fighting ability of men around them simply by hearing their voices.
June 15, 2010
Chimpanzees may comfort others in distress in ways very similar to how people do, according to what may be the largest study of consolation in animals by far.
June 14, 2010
While the evolution from the Neolithic solid stone wheel to the sleek wheels of today's racing bikes can be seen as the result of human ingenuity, it also represents how animals, including humans, have come to move more efficiently and quicker over millions of years on Earth
June 11, 2010
The need to stay cool in the cradle of human evolution may relate, at least in part, to why pre-humans learned to walk upright, lost the fur that covered the bodies of their predecessors and became able to sweat more.
May 25, 2010
Scientists have discovered that the hormone testosterone, which makes men physically strong and aggressive, seems also to be connected to cynicism and a lack of trust in others.
May 20, 2010
Men, women, left-brainers, right-brainers, Asians, Africans, we are all pretty much the same.
May 12, 2010
If a female experimenter patted a participant on the back, they'd risk more money than if she just talked to them, or if a man did the patting.
May 10, 2010
All cultures make music, though no one knows why; it's not obviously useful in the way cooking or language are. Now psychologists are putting this universality back on the agenda, and are investigating whether certain elements of music are hard-wired into the brain.
May 7, 2010
How closely are Neanderthals related to us? They are so closely related that some researchers group them and us as a single species.
May 4, 2010
The human ego has never been quite the same since the day in 1960 that Jane Goodall observed a chimpanzee feasting on termites near Lake Tanganyika. No longer could humans claim to be the only tool-making species.
May 3, 2010
Creatures across the animal kingdom prefer to use one paw, eye or even antenna for certain tasks, even though they may then be let down in crucial situations by their weaker side. Why would animal brains ever have evolved a characteristic that seems to put them in harm's way?
May 3, 2010
Men are generally better than women on tests of spatial ability. But a new study suggests that under some circumstances a woman’s way of navigating is probably more efficient.
April 30, 2010
A new study finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species. Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks.
April 26, 2010
Chimpanzees keep "bedside vigils" and mourn deaths like humans, a study has revealed.
April 20, 2010
When we're under immediate stress—say, we are about to give a speech or about to be mugged—we either fight or flee, or so scientists have long preached. But some psychologists are now suggesting that this scenario may apply mainly to males.
April 16, 2010
Brain cells that may underlie our ability to empathise with others have been detected directly in people for the first time.
April 8, 2010
Since the Ancient World, intellectuals have predicted that faith would wither away in the face of expanding human knowledge. But the prediction was wrong.
April 6, 2010
Basic human learning systems use areas of the brain that also exist in the most primitive vertebrates, such as certain fish, reptiles and amphibians.
April 5, 2010
The notion that men have shorter fuses than women has acquired the status of a psychological shibboleth.
April 1, 2010
Laughing is primal, our first way of communicating. Apes laugh. So do dogs and rats. Babies laugh long before they speak. No one teaches you how to laugh. You just do.
April 1, 2010
A layered process of figuring out what someone else is thinking—of mind reading—is both a common literary device and an essential survival skill.
March 25, 2010
Our ability to think has long been considered central to what makes us human. Now research suggests that our bodies and their relationship with the environment govern even our most abstract thoughts.
March 25, 2010
Study of moral judgment finds that patients with a specific brain defect lack the emotional reaction necessary to find fault with attempted murderers.
March 24, 2010
There's a plan afoot among evolutionary scientists to launch a big new project—to look back in time and find out how climate change over millions of years affected human evolution.
March 12, 2010
Surprisingly little evolutionarily informed research has been done on our species’ strange love affair with sports.
March 11, 2010
Researchers set up games to investigate the relationship between perceptions of trustworthiness and perceptions and behaviour. They found that participants were more likely to entrust money to men with narrower faces.
March 8, 2010
Scotland’s notoriously bad weather appears to be behind why more of the country's population appeared to be blessed with ginger hair, new research has claimed.
March 5, 2010
How did historic climate change shape human evolution?
March 2, 2010
As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection. A new force is now coming into focus—that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution.
February 24, 2010
Higher intelligence is associated with liberal political ideology, atheism, and men's (but not women's) preference for sexual exclusivity.
February 23, 2010
Chimpanzees are intelligent enough to appreciate how big a pint of liquid is, or the volume of any other measure.
February 18, 2010
Some Africans living within walking distance of one another are more genetically diverse than a European and an Asian living a continent apart.
February 12, 2010
Humans, other great apes and bears are among the few animals that step first on the heel when walking, and then roll onto the ball of the foot and toes. Now, a study shows the advantage.
February 9, 2010
Human brains are slow to develop—a secret, perhaps, of our success.
February 5, 2010
Music is a mystery. It is unique to the human race; it has been, and remains, part of every known civilisation on Earth; and it engages people's attention more comprehensively than almost anything else.
February 3, 2010
Scientists have shown that we move faster when we react to something in our environment than we do when we initiate the action ourselves. Inspired by cowboy movies, in reality it's more useful for avoiding oncoming traffic.
February 1, 2010
Using slow-motion footage, scientists have discovered that experienced barefoot runners land very differently from runners who wear shoes.
January 26, 2010
Certain emotions, such as happiness, anger, fear, sadness, disgust and surprise, are universal, and provide further evidence that such emotions form a set of basic, evolved functions that are shared by all cultures.
January 21, 2010
With 6.8 billion people alive today, it's hard to fathom that humans were ever imperiled. But 1.2 million years ago, only 18,500 early humans were breeding on the planet—evidence that there was a real risk of extinction for our early ancestors.
January 20, 2010
Most men in Europe can trace a line of descent to early farmers who migrated from the Near East, a study says.
January 20, 2010
Thinking of a dog activates an area of the brain that deals with animate objects, whereas a hammer excites one that processes inanimate things. But the same thing would have happened even if you had never seen a dog or a hammer before.
January 20, 2010
Domestic dogs have followed their own evolutionary path, twisting Darwin's directive 'survival of the fittest' to their own needs—and have proved him right in the process.
January 19, 2010
Scientists may have solved the mystery of how human hands became nimble enough to make and manipulate stone tools.
January 19, 2010
Researchers have proved that they are able to calculate in their heads whether the number of dots on a screen is increasing or decreasing.
January 14, 2010
Far from being in a state of decay, the Y chromosome is the fastest-changing part of the human genome and is constantly renewing itself.
January 12, 2010
Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved?
January 7, 2010
Genomes of humans and other mammals contain DNA derived from the insertion of bornaviruses, RNA viruses whose replication and transcription takes place in the nucleus.
January 6, 2010
Scientists found that some of our closest animal relatives—monkeys—pay more attention to the older members of a group than they do to youngsters.
December 21, 2009
"A tidy house, a tidy mind." Some of the more slovenly among us might bristle at this scolding old proverb, but to human evolution researchers it makes perfect sense.
December 21, 2009
The Egyptians supposedly used it to guide the construction the Pyramids. The architecture of ancient Athens is thought to have been based on it. Fictional Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon tried to unravel its mysteries in the novel The Da Vinci Code.
December 7, 2009
Men carry the seeds of their own destruction in the genes present in their sperm, research suggests.
December 4, 2009
Genes in sperm may determine why female mammals live longer than males.
December 4, 2009
Humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat rich diets.
December 3, 2009
Male and female shopping styles are in our genes—and we can look to evolution for the reason.
November 30, 2009
The portion of our brains that is responsible for registering fear and even panic has a built-in chemical sensor that is triggered by a primordial terror—suffocation.
November 24, 2009
Researchers have found that the color of a person's skin affects how healthy and therefore attractive they appear, and have found that diet may be crucial to achieving the most desirable complexion.
November 23, 2009
A new hypothesis, called "the activation hypothesis," sets out to explain the natural origins of the only human body part arguably less attractive than the penis—the testicles.
November 20, 2009
People are not instruments or tools to be wielded for our own purposes, pawns to help us achieve our personal goals. Yet we do use people anyway, often in more subtle ways than these. Why is that?
November 18, 2009
In most species males show more consistent, predictable behaviours, particularly in relation to parental care, aggression and risk-taking. Females, on the other hand, are more likely to vary their behaviour.
November 16, 2009
Language in humans are controlled by the left cerebral hemisphere. A new study suggests that this "hemispheric lateralization" for language may have its evolutionary roots in the gestural communication of our common ancestors.
November 11, 2009
If humans are genetically related to chimps, why did our brains develop the innate ability for language and speech while theirs did not?
November 9, 2009
Our human ancestors did not each much fruit, but instead consumed a lot of root vegetables, nuts, insects and some meat, according to a new study.
November 6, 2009
The first atlas of bacterial diversity across the human body shows wide variations in microbe populations that live in different regions of the body and which aid us in physiological functions that contribute to our health.
November 3, 2009
Being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.
October 30, 2009
The propensity to believe in paranormal phenomena and superstitions appears to arise in the womb, suggests new research.
October 29, 2009
Evolutionary outcomes can be influenced by culture as well as genes, according to a new study released on Wednesday comparing societies around the world.
October 27, 2009
Most mammals can sprint faster than humans—having four legs gives them the advantage. But when it comes to long distances, humans can outrun almost any animal.
October 22, 2009
Perhaps the most fundamental question neuroscientists are investigating is whether our perception of the world is continuous or a series of discrete snapshots like frames on a film strip.
October 21, 2009
Women are better than men at distinguishing between emotions, especially fear and disgust.
October 20, 2009
Women of the future are likely to be slightly shorter and plumper, have healthier hearts and longer reproductive windows. These changes are predicted by the strongest proof to date that humans are still evolving.
October 19, 2009
Attractive people are rated as more trustworthy and honest, and lookers earn more money, too. Now, scientists report that this deferential treatment may lead the beautiful to be more trusting when they know others can see them.
October 15, 2009
There are footsteps behind you in the dark alley and they're getting closer. By the time you turn around to see who is following, your brain's vision circuits have already boosted their sensitivity.
October 13, 2009
Researchers have come up with a new twist on the mysterious visual phenomenon experienced by humans known as the "uncanny valley." The scientists have found that monkeys sense it too.
October 13, 2009
Sometimes it's the little things in life that make all the difference—in this case, the three littlest bones of the human body.
October 9, 2009
The way we perceive dangers might depend on how recently we learned about them.
October 6, 2009
Deep down, we are all cannibals. Our cells are perpetually devouring themselves, shredding their own complex molecules to pieces and recycling them for new parts.
September 29, 2009
A new study demonstrates that thinking about love—but not about sex—causes us to think more "globally," making it easier to come up with new ideas.
September 25, 2009
Does sex really persuade us to buy a product? Why do economies slip into depressions? A spate of new books tries to answer these and other questions about how we make our choices.
September 23, 2009
If you find yourself more concerned about highly publicized dangers that grab your immediate attention such as terrorist attacks, while forgetting about the more mundane threats such as global warming, you're not alone.
September 18, 2009
Exercising in a group can be more effective by making things easier.
September 16, 2009
Human brains light up when they see tools being used—but the sight fails to impress the brains of macaque monkey, our fellow primates, in the same way.
September 16, 2009
We all trade in stereotypes every day, whether we like it or not. It's how we sort an impossibly complex world into manageable categories. It's a fact of the human psyche.
September 15, 2009
Will these hands ne'er be clean?" asks Lady Macbeth, as she obsessively tries to wash away the guilt she feels for her role in the murder of King Duncan. These metaphors crop up in everyday phrases, too, in many languages.
September 14, 2009
Evolutionary psychologists examine the adaptive function of blushing in social situations.
September 9, 2009
More than 454,000 adults aged 18 and over were asked by phone for their height and evaluate their lives. Overall, taller individuals judged their lives more favourably and were more likely to report positive emotions.
September 2, 2009
Music has great power to alter our emotions—making us happy or sad, agitated or calm. Psychologists have tried in vain to figure out why that happens. Now, a composer says he's has a clue. And he got it by writing music not for humans, but for monkeys.
September 1, 2009
That the risk-taking end of the financial industry is dominated by men is unarguable. But does it discriminate against women merely because they are women?
August 31, 2009
Why are men's muscles so much bigger than women's? Partly, of course, because men do the fighting and hunting. But also, perhaps, because women like men who can do these things well, and are thus attracted to muscular men.
August 21, 2009
People maintain false beliefs, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because it helps them make sense of a current reality.
August 21, 2009
If we can't see landmarks, we really do end up walking in circles. That's the conclusion of researchers who have tracked people trying to cross pathless deserts and forests.
August 18, 2009
Along with our flair for language and our unparalleled intelligence, less-than-stellar navigational skills are among the things that can be considered uniquely human.
August 17, 2009
Why do we have personality at all? It wouldn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary point of view. The traits that have been wired into our genes and neurons over the millennia tend not to be differences, but things we all share in common.
August 6, 2009
We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation.
July 31, 2009
Men are better at seeing things in the distance, while women are better focusing on things at close range, results which may be due to our hunter-gatherer past.
July 30, 2009
The mystery of why we swing our arms as we walk may have been solved, after scientists discovered that it is more energy-efficient than holding them still.
July 30, 2009
The discovery comes from experiments showing that an infant chimpanzee prefers to listen to consonant music over dissonant music. That suggests the apes are born with an innate appreciation of pleasant sounds.
July 29, 2009
The smell of the sweat you produce when terrified is not only registered by the brains of others, but changes their behaviour too.
July 29, 2009
Everyone has hunches—about friends' motives, about the stock market, about when to fold a hand of poker and when to hold it. But United States troops are now at the center of a large effort to understand how it is that in a life-or-death situation, some people's brains can sense danger and act on it well before others' do.
July 17, 2009
Scientists have long suspected that the sex chromosome that only males carry is deteriorating and could disappear entirely within a few million years.
July 13, 2009
It might be socially unacceptable, but an outburst of swearing after a mishap or stubbing a toe can actually do some good.
July 13, 2009
The study suggests the human ability to distinguish faces is 30+ million years old.
July 8, 2009
Studies on monkeys have revealed clues about the evolution of language.
July 7, 2009
We swim in a sea of information, but filter out most of what we see or hear. A new analysis found that people tend to avoid information that contradicts what they already think or believe.
June 17, 2009
Human intelligence may not be so human after all.
June 10, 2009
Are the cognitively superior brains of humans, in part, responsible for our higher rates of cancer?
June 8, 2009
Boys who carry a particular variation of the gene Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), sometimes called the "warrior gene," are more likely not only to join gangs but also to be among the most violent members and to use weapons.
June 4, 2009
The first hoots of laughter from an ancient ancestor of humans rippled across the land at least 10 million years ago, according to a study of giggling primates.
May 28, 2009
A model that examines the behaviour of parasites infecting their hosts renders the evolutionary paradigm of group selection unnecessary.
May 27, 2009
Our brain is wired to identify gender based on facial cues and coloring, according to a new study.
May 21, 2009
Monkeys playing a game similar to "Let's Make A Deal" have revealed that their brains register missed opportunities and learn from their mistakes.
May 20, 2009
Behavioral ecologists working in Bolivia have found that wild spider monkeys control their diets in a similar way to humans, contrary to what has been thought up to now.
May 19, 2009
Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?
May 19, 2009
If avoidance and retreat have to do with danger, is it possible that backward motion might actually recruit more brain power than forward motion?
May 15, 2009
Through sophisticated statistical analyses and advanced computer simulations, researchers are learning more about the genomic patterns of human population structure around the world.
May 11, 2009
It was one of the thorniest questions of the 20th Century and it remains a conundrum today. Are all "ordinary" people potentially violent?
May 8, 2009
A new study finds that men with lower IQs are more likely to suffer from dozens of health problems—from hernias, to ear inflammation, to cataracts—compared with those showing greater intelligence.
May 5, 2009
In recent years, social psychologists have begun to study what they call the holier-than-thou effect. But this self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral judgment.
May 4, 2009
Isolation of a gene called DARPP-32 helps explain why some people fly into a rage at the slightest provocation, while others can remain calm.
May 1, 2009
Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.
April 29, 2009
Human brain can recognize objects much faster than some have thought.
April 27, 2009
Scrawnier people are more likely to perceive an approaching sound as closer than it actually is. This connection may have evolved to help the weak get out of the way of approaching danger.
April 24, 2009
Just think about what it takes to learn biology. Not textbook biology, rather, the kind you learn on your own, as a young child encountering the vast and diverse world of living things.
April 21, 2009
An interview with Richard Wrangham, a primatologist and anthropologist, who contends that our large brain and the shape of our bodies are the product of a rich diet that was only available to us after we began cooking our foods.
April 20, 2009
Comparisons of the genomes of humans and chimpanzees are revealing those rare stretches of DNA that are ours alone.
April 17, 2009
Evidence mounts that your brain decides before you know about it.
April 15, 2009
In our increasingly urbanized world, it turns out that a little green can go a long way toward improving our health, not just that of the planet.
April 10, 2009
Are the rewards of being a good and honest man simply not enough to curb our darker impulses? Or are we all both sinners and saints, depending on the circumstances?
March 30, 2009
Runners, listen up: If your body is telling you that your pace feels a little too fast or a little too slow, it may be right.
March 25, 2009
As the genomes of more and more species are sequenced, geneticists are piecing together an extraordinarily detailed picture of the molecules that are fundamental to life on Earth.
March 23, 2009
Something as basic as vision is intimately rooted in our fears and in our ancient strategies for survival.
March 18, 2009
Consciousness arises as an emergent property of the human mind.
March 18, 2009
If the deeply devout seem less self-doubting than others, perhaps it's because religion helps them shrug off mistakes.
March 16, 2009
Analyses of primate visual pigments show that our color vision evolved in an unusual way and that the brain is more adaptable than generally thought.
March 13, 2009
Recent studies now confirm for the first time that natural human body odors provides information about human emotions that is detectable by other people.
March 12, 2009
If you're ever lost in the jungle, follow a chimpanzee. New research suggests the great apes keep a geometric mental map of their home range, moving from point to point in nearly straight lines.
March 11, 2009
A Skeptic's advice on how to avoid falling prey to con artists.
March 10, 2009
Keepers at Furuvik Zoo found that the chimp collected and stored stones that he would later use as missiles.
March 10, 2009
Once we had evolved the necessary brain architecture, we could "do" religion, brain scans indicate.
March 9, 2009
A 2-year-old, it turns out, knows the difference between right and wrong. And by the time children are 3 to 4 years old, they recognize certain behaviors—such as hitting —as wrong, even when no one is watching
March 4, 2009
We feel more altruistic to those who resemble us because in the past our early ancestors assumed that they were related.
March 3, 2009
Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.
March 2, 2009
A new study by scientists in France offers a possible explanation for left-handedness, finding that the trait survived since prehistoric times in part due to its rarity, which offered benefits.
February 27, 2009
Researchers who studied the facial expressions of volunteers found close similarities between their reaction to moral outrage and feelings of "disgust".
February 25, 2009
A woman's love of shopping is a throwback to her days in the caves, according to a new study.
February 24, 2009
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so the saying goes, and this is certainly true of the different ways men and women appreciate art.
February 23, 2009
While science tries to understand the stuff dreams are made of, humans, from cultures all over the world, continue to believe that dreams contain important hidden truths, according to newly published research.
February 20, 2009
The evolutionary role of cookery.
February 18, 2009
There's one vice which dispenses with any hedonic trappings and instead feels so painful you would think it was a virtue, except that there’s no gain in lean muscle mass at the end: envy.
February 5, 2009
It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times.
February 4, 2009
Women are not from Venus any more than men are from Mars. But even though both sexes are perfectly terrestrial beings, they are not lacking in other differences. And not only in their reproductive organs and behavior, either.
January 27, 2009
Music appreciation begins in the womb, suggests new research that found newborns can feel the beat, even in their sleep.
January 27, 2009
Can’t help being the life of the party? Maybe you were just born that way.
January 26, 2009
There is probably no snake phobia programmed into our genetic code, but we do have an evolved mental readiness to be fearful of certain things in our world--like men of a different race.
January 23, 2009
Individuals with the so-called "warrior gene" display higher levels of aggression in response to provocation.
January 9, 2009
People come into the world ready to count its wonders.
January 5, 2009
Research suggests that smiles and grimaces are innate rather than a product of cultural learning.
December 19, 2008
To whom would you rather give money: a needy person in your neighborhood or a needy person in a foreign country? If you’re a man, you’re more likely to give to the person closest to you.
December 17, 2008
How biological hand-me-downs inherited from fish and tadpoles evolved into human maladies.
December 9, 2008
Men overspend to attract mates. It all boils down, as it has for hundreds of thousands of years, to making babies.
December 4, 2008
Ever had a feeling come over you that you just can't explain? Like suddenly getting all warm and fuzzy when you meet someone for the first time, while somebody else who looks just as good leaves you cold?
December 2, 2008
No one needs to tell Disney, which brought the likes of Herbie the Love Bug and Lightning McQueen to the big screen, that cars have personality.
November 25, 2008
Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news?
November 18, 2008
Having a bad hair day? You're excused. After all, hair has its origins in stuff that used to make just claws.
November 14, 2008
Pelvis dated to 1.2 million years ago shows our ancestors were born with bigger heads.
November 10, 2008
It's well known that non-human primates can be taught to do very human-like things but the general assumption is that there is an immutable upper limit to their abilities. But at least one scientist thinks otherwise.
November 7, 2008
Unlike their female classmates, it was not the same-sex models that affected the males negatively, but quite the opposite.
November 6, 2008
Researchers have carried out the largest study of differences between human and chimpanzee genomes, identifying regions that have been duplicated or lost during evolution of the two lineages.
November 3, 2008
Language has many layers of meaning. When and how do we grasp them?
October 31, 2008
Genes that make some people gay make their brothers and sisters fecund.
October 22, 2008
Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die.
October 21, 2008
Many of us are bad at remembering names but we are very quick to point out that at least we never forget a face. Never mind recognizing a familiar face—how is it that we recognize faces at all?
October 20, 2008
Study provides evidence that gorilla communication is linked to the left hemisphere of the brain—just as it is in humans.
October 15, 2008
We all negotiate compromises every day, but it often seems that certain people always get their way. Do these skilled negotiators simply go with their gut instinct every time or are they just extremely calculating?
October 2, 2008
Don't believe the multitasking hype. We humans aren't as good as we think we are at doing several things at once. But we also have a human skill that gave us an evolutionary edge.
September 26, 2008
Political conservatives operate out of a fear of chaos and absence of order while political liberals operate out of a fear of emptiness.
September 25, 2008
Do people attribute certain personality traits or emotions to car fronts? Some do most of the time.
September 19, 2008
New research has found evidence that how we look for things, such as our car keys or umbrella, could be related to how we search for more abstract needs, such as words in memory or solutions to problems.
September 17, 2008
Rugged looking men, such as Russell Crowe, get more of a competitive buzz out of watching their team win than relatively babyfaced males, such as Gareth Gates, Richard Hammond and Johnny Depp.
September 16, 2008
Darwin never warned against crossing black cats, walking under ladders or stepping on cracks in the pavement, but his theory of natural selection explains why people believe in such nonsense.
September 16, 2008
Rats, pigeons, monkeys, babies—all can tell more from fewer, abundant from stingy. But when it comes to genuine computation, that calls for a very different number system, one that is specific, symbolic and highly abstract.
September 5, 2008
Scientists have for the first time recorded individual brain cells in the act of summoning a spontaneous memory.
September 2, 2008
Subtle refinements in brain architecture, rather than large-scale alterations, make us smarter than other animals.
August 29, 2008
The old adage "sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you", simply is not true, according to researchers.
August 28, 2008
Children transform from being selfish to sharing by the age of eight years old, a developmental change so sudden that it can only be explained, at least in part, by genes, according to a study.
August 25, 2008
The next time someone says, "I smell danger in the air," that might literally be true—and the odor might be coming from you.
August 22, 2008
The shape of your face betrays how aggressive you are—if you are a man.
August 20, 2008
Far from being a weak and unimportant sense, our odor-detecting ability is surprisingly acute and shapes our social interactions in ways we do not consciously realize.
August 19, 2008
Findings suggest we are hard-wired for representing quantity ideas and that the lack of number words in a language does not prevent us from completing simple number and computation tasks.
August 18, 2008
Brain scientists have identified nerve cells that monitor performance, detect errors and govern the ability to learn from misfortunes.
August 15, 2008
My first phone number was Prospect 67210. The quaint sound of that number is enough to tell you how long it has been bouncing around in my neurons.
August 12, 2008
The victory stance of a gold medalist and the slumped shoulders of a non-finalist are innate and biological rather than learned responses to success and failure.
August 11, 2008
Our visual memory is not as good as we may think, but it can be used more flexibly than scientists previously thought.
August 11, 2008
After two tremendous growth spurts—one in size, followed by an even more important one in cognitive ability—the human brain is now a lot like a teenage boy
August 7, 2008
Our ancient instincts don't meet the decision-making needs of a modern world.
August 5, 2008
Metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of our unique cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities. Schizophrenia may be a costly by-product of human brain evolution.
August 4, 2008
Men, it would seem, always have an ulterior motive—even when it comes to giving to charity.
August 1, 2008
The recent medical controversy over whether vaccinations cause autism reveals a habit of human cognition—thinking anecdotally comes naturally, whereas thinking scientifically does not.
July 31, 2008
A new school of economists is controversially turning to neuroscience to improve the dismal science.
July 18, 2008
Contrary to the moans of many dieters, being hungry may make you happy. Or, at least, it can be a serious motivator whose evolutionary intent was to help you find dinner instead of becoming dinner.
July 17, 2008
Children as young as 14 months old can—and do—use the same technique as adults to increase their working memories.
July 9, 2008
Modern man still relies on ancient, reptilian brain centres to make life-or-death decisions because they are faster thinking than the ones that make us human.
July 4, 2008
A battle of ideas is going on inside your mind.
July 3, 2008
When people can only communicate with hand gestures, they speak a kind of "universal language" says a new study.
July 1, 2008
The moral hypocrite has convinced himself that he is acting virtuously even when he does something he would condemn in others.
June 30, 2008
Your sense of adventure comes from a primitive area of the brain called the ventral striatum.
June 20, 2008
Mankind’s inner chimpanzee refuses to let go. This matters to everything from economics to law.
June 18, 2008
Male homosexuality can be explained by the idea of sexually antagonistic selection, in which genetic factors spread in the population by giving a reproductive advantage to one sex while disadvantaging the other.
June 17, 2008
The evolutionary mystery of why our faces contort when we are scared has been solved by a team of Canadian neuroscientists.
June 16, 2008
First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny.
June 13, 2008
The genetic legacy of nomadism may be an inability to settle.
June 12, 2008
Brain-imaging study proves that it's hard to part with the things we own.
June 11, 2008
A new study presents evidence of symbolic reasoning in tufted capuchin monkeys, a South-American species that diverged from humans about 35 million years ago.
June 11, 2008
From an evolutionary perspective, the idea that a belief in God might be hardwired into the brain is as intriguing as it is problematic.
June 9, 2008
Two waves of increased sophistication in the structure of nerve junctions could have been the force that allowed complex brains—including our own—to evolve. The big building blocks evolved before big brains.
June 6, 2008
Recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences.
June 4, 2008
Freshly cooked meals may not be an option in the wild, but an extensive taste test involving several great apes has revealed that, like humans, they seem to prefer cooked foods over raw.
June 2, 2008
Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi does not bother with how the brain accomplishes a task, but rather why it performs the function in the first place.
May 30, 2008
We might like to think of ourselves as sleek and perfectly-adapted products of evolution, but the brain is a clumsy collection of spare parts. If evolution is so powerful, how did we end up so flawed?
May 23, 2008
There was a time when we thought humans were special in so many ways. Now we know better.
May 21, 2008
MIT's Dan Ariely discusses his research in behavioral economics and explains how to deal with our brain's flawed decision-making process.
May 20, 2008
Vestigial organs are parts of the body that once had a function but are now more-or-less useless. The idea that we are carrying around useless relics of our evolutionary past has long fascinated scientists and laypeople alike.
May 16, 2008
A man's verbal responses to "thank you" may also be a way of posturing their dominance.
May 12, 2008
Watch young chimpanzees beat Japanese college students in a short-term-memory test by a wide margin—raising questions about primate intelligence and evolution. (video)
May 6, 2008
Prior to getting on the plane, which of these precautions is most likely to prevent your plane from crashing? A) Sacrificing a gilt-horned bull on an altar. B) Sacrificing two goats on the tarmac. C) Buying flight insurance.
April 21, 2008
Your mind might be made up before you know it. Researchers have found patterns of brain activity that predict people's decisions up to 10 seconds before they're aware they've made a choice.
April 14, 2008
Emotions are as much a product of our evolutionary heritage as they are our environmental circumstances.
April 4, 2008
New research sheds light on why women survive for decades when females in many other species die after they lose the ability to reproduce.
April 2, 2008
When painted, they add a girly sparkle, and they can substitute as a guitar pick or even a backscratcher. These savvy services, though, are not the reason we humans sport the keratin-rich coverings atop our fingertips.
March 31, 2008
Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter.
March 28, 2008
Our noses can quickly learn to link even subtle changes in smell with danger.
March 27, 2008
Skepticism is the fine art and technical science of understanding why rejecting everyone else's reality and substituting your own almost always results in a failed belief system. Where in the brain do such belief processes unfold?
March 24, 2008
When we help friends in need, we are prompted by feelings of empathy, and when we help relatives we do so because we have expectations of reciprocity.
March 21, 2008
It’s possible to buy happiness after all: when you spend money on others.
March 18, 2008
A belief in God could lead to a more contented life, research suggests.
March 17, 2008
Height matters. Tall people get larger salaries, higher status and more respect. Furthermore, the advantage seems to be life-long.
March 11, 2008
It is often said some people by nature have a sunny disposition. Now scientists could have discovered why.
March 5, 2008
Our level of happiness throughout life is strongly influenced by the genes with which we were born, say experts.
March 4, 2008
Forgiveness can be a powerful means to healing, but it does not come naturally for both sexes.
February 29, 2008
A key part of the brain used by humans when communicating is also used by chimps.
February 27, 2008
Some of the oldest tales and wisest mythology allude to the snake as a mischievous seducer, dangerous foe or powerful iconoclast; however, the legend surrounding this proverbial predator may not be based solely on fantasy.
February 21, 2008
Women better than men at remembering everyday events.
February 19, 2008
A Harvard University scientist has synthesized four key differences in human and animal cognition into a hypothesis on what exactly differentiates human and animal thought.
February 4, 2008
Scientists have found more than 500 genes that account for variations across human populations including skin colour, height and vulnerability to disease, according to a new study.
January 30, 2008
Don't take that hammer for granted. Using tools may seem like second nature, but only a few animals can master the coordination and mental sophistication required.
January 25, 2008
People who feel lonely are more likely to believe in the supernatural, whether that is God, angels or miracles, a new study finds.
January 24, 2008
It's all too easy to lock the door and bask in the privacy our ancestors could only dream of. But our search for solitude can subvert an even stronger need—to connect with others.
January 18, 2008
Research tries to explain why the sexes choose different strategies to get from A to B.
January 17, 2008
Researchers find that humans have changed significantly in just the past 1,500 years or so.
January 14, 2008
The brain processes aggression as a reward—much like sex, food and drugs—offering insights into our propensity to fight and our fascination with violent sports like boxing and football.
January 2, 2008
The basis for laughter may have originated in an ancient primate ancestral to both humans and modern apes, a study suggests.
December 24, 2007
Human evolution has speeded up over the past 80,000 years. That raises awkward questions about the concept of "race".
December 21, 2007
Attention shoppers. Scientists have confirmed what many of us already know—and have experienced this holiday season. That is, most men buy, but most women shop.
December 18, 2007
Researchers have demonstrated that monkeys have the ability to perform mental addition. In fact, monkeys performed about as well as college students given the same test.
December 17, 2007
Our hominid ancestors could never have eaten enough raw food to support our large, calorie-hungry brains, Richard Wrangham claims. The secret to our evolution, he says, is cooking.
December 17, 2007
Brain's fear centers also activate when scenting a stranger, study finds.
December 14, 2007
Chimps share many traits that we consider to be uniquely human, but now a new study suggests that the menopause really does set humans apart from other apes.
December 12, 2007
Detecting an animal's immediate presence and then monitoring its movements was vital to the physical safety, nutrition, and well-being of stone-age families. A nonconscious attention system still exists in the human brain.
December 11, 2007
Human pygmies around the world are smaller than average because they tend to live very short lives, in some communities as little as 16 years, a new study says.
December 11, 2007
Analysis of common patterns of genetic variation reveals that humans have been evolving faster in recent history.
December 7, 2007
How many times a day do you grab objects such as a pencil or a cup? We perform these tasks without thinking, however the motor planning necessary to grasp an object is quite complex. Is this a human trait or can other animals do it?
December 5, 2007
Having trouble passing up dessert, or the cute shoes that aren't in your budget? You might want to imitate apes.
December 4, 2007
A bar of chocolate, a long soak in the bath, a snooze in the middle of the afternoon, a leisurely stroll in the park. These are the things that make us the most happy.
December 4, 2007
Brain scanning experiment shows how much we take others' earnings as a measure of our success.
December 3, 2007
Chimpanzees have an extraordinary photographic memory that is far superior to ours, research suggests.
November 30, 2007
Men regularly court disaster when it comes to their own health. Traits such as toughness, stoicism, and fearlessness can translate into medical disaster. It's time men learned to make a fuss.
November 20, 2007
You may not know it, but you're part virus. At least, some of your genes come from viruses that slipped their DNA into the genes of our primate ancestors millions of years ago.
November 15, 2007
The observation that males evolve more quickly than females has been around since 19th century biologist Charles Darwin noted the majesty of a peacock’s tail feather in comparison with the plainness of the peahen’s.
November 14, 2007
Chimpanzees crave roots and tubers even when food is plentiful above ground, according to a new study that raises questions about the relative importance of meat for brain evolution.
November 13, 2007
But not in all circumstances.
November 8, 2007
New research from the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics examining how people place value on money and other items is helping scientists to decipher how and why people make the decisions they do.
November 6, 2007
For half a century, social psychologists have been trying to figure out the human gift for rationalizing irrational behavior. Why did we evolve with brains that salute our shrewdness for buying the neon yellow car with bad gas mileage?
November 5, 2007
Is it just coincidence that Bobby Bonds and his son Barry both made baseball history with their all-star power and speed? Or that Francis Ford Coppola and daughter Sofia rose to fame as award-winning film directors?
November 2, 2007
More evidence that Neanderthals could talk to each other.
October 31, 2007
You may not want a monkey to balance your chequebook, but you still have to give them credit – monkeys not only understand written numbers, but individual brain cells may become dedicated to specific numbers.
October 30, 2007
Young men drive fast because they perceive speed as inherently male, researchers say.
October 26, 2007
A new study shows that what sets us apart from our closest primate cousin is the accelerated rate at which we acquire new genes and ditch unnecessary ones.
October 23, 2007
Question is, why does it take so much work to become a compassionate, peaceful, happy person? Why aren't we all wearing saffron robes and laughing?
October 19, 2007
Are you happy? Well don't try to be happier; you might become less happy.
October 10, 2007
Chinese, Africans and Indians may differ in what odors they find yummy, but they all perceive pleasantness in the same way.
October 5, 2007
Apes are patient, but only people are fair. That may help explain why people came out on top.
October 4, 2007
We appear biologically designed to sleep in two or more interrupted bouts during the night and then fall asleep again during the day.
October 2, 2007
Now, a study finds these annoying teeth may only exist because of a weakness in a developmental mechanism that allows them to cram their way into the back of the jaw.
October 1, 2007
Scientists have known that on the whole, females of all ages tend to worry more and have more intense worries than males. Women also tend to perceive more risk in situations and grow more anxious than men. Now we know why.
September 28, 2007
There are twice as many males as females in the brightest two per cent of the population. The research, however, also points out that there are twice as many males as females in the least intelligent two per cent of the population.
September 27, 2007
Like hunter-gatherers in the jungle, modern humans are still experts at spotting predators and prey, despite the developed world's safe suburbs and indoor lifestyle.
September 24, 2007
Basic principles of biology rather than women’s newfound economic independence can explain why fewer of them are getting married and having children, and why the trend may only be temporary.
September 13, 2007
Some sex differences that look biological are really cultural.
September 11, 2007
The earliest humans almost certainly walked upright on two legs but may have struggled to run at even half the speed of modern man.
August 31, 2007
The brains of men and women are, indeed, different.
August 29, 2007
A camper who chases a grizzly but won't risk unprotected sex. A sky diver afraid to stand up to the boss. New research shows that not all risk is created equal and people show a mixture of both risky and non-risky behaviors.
August 28, 2007
Do you remember exactly where you were when you learned of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks? Your answer is probably yes, and researchers are beginning to understand why we remember events that carry negative emotional weight.
August 24, 2007
A new study shows different regions of the brain kick into action depending on the perceived threat level.
August 21, 2007
Evolution may have driven women's preference for pink.
August 19, 2007
Charity is just as "selfish" as self-indulgence.
July 31, 2007
Human beings can run long distances because we carry multiple copies of a gene that helps supply our cells with energy. That supports the idea that endurance running gave our human ancestors an evolutionary edge.
July 30, 2007
Climate change isn't just about how humans affect the environment—it's a question of adaption, too. Humans are the most adaptable species on Earth. From NPR.
July 27, 2007
Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive.
July 25, 2007
Intuition really does come from the gut. It's also a kind of matching game based on experience. There are times when trusting your gut is the smartest move—and times you'd better think twice.
July 19, 2007
New research has proved the single origin of humans theory by combining studies of global genetic variations in humans with skull measurements across the world.
July 17, 2007
A new study provides support for the hypothesis that walking on two legs, or bipedalism, evolved because it used less energy than quadrupedal knucklewalking.
July 13, 2007
Scientists report that genes play a large role in determining individual differences in sour taste perception.
July 12, 2007
Genome sequences suggest that natural selection has caused as much as 10 percent of the human genome to change in the last 15,000 to 100,000 years, when people began migrating from Africa.
July 6, 2007
New research challenges the notion—frequently communicated in major publications, broadcast media and popular entertainment—that women talk significantly more than men.
July 2, 2007
Psychologists have identified an 'early warning signal' in the brain that helps us avoid repeating previous mistakes.
June 29, 2007
For many scientists, the evidence that moral reasoning is a result of physical traits that evolve along with everything else is just more evidence against the existence of the soul, or of a God to imbue humans with souls.
June 26, 2007
Humans are often thought of as the only truly altruistic species. But evidence is gathering that we might not be alone.
June 25, 2007
A woman with a twin brother has fewer children.
June 20, 2007
90% of the cells within us are not ours but microbes'.
June 19, 2007
Children with autism, who are unable to grasp the mental states of others, can nonetheless identify with conventional stereotypes based on a person's race and sex.
June 18, 2007
Pride has perplexed philosophers and theologians for centuries. We applaud rugged individualism, self-reliance and personal excellence, and indeed encourage these traits. But don’t you dare let it go to your head.
June 18, 2007
Neanderthals as innovators? That the concept seems amusing goes to show how our sister species has become the butt of our jokes. Yet in the Middle Palaeolithic, some 300,000 years ago, innovation is what the Neanderthals were up to.
June 12, 2007
The next time you are plagued with indecision and need a clear way out, it might help to get angry.
June 11, 2007
The speakers of tonal and non-tonal languages have genetic differences.
June 8, 2007
Scientists have long wondered if local animal cultures exist, and now, they have their answer: Yes.
June 6, 2007
When it comes to penises, length matters more to men than to women, according to a new study that reviews more than 60 years of research and debunks numerous sex myths.
June 4, 2007
A new study of Sumatran orangutans in Indonesia suggests that ancient apes may have developed upright walking while still living in the trees—well before human ancestors, known as hominids, ever descended to the ground.
May 31, 2007
Baffling differences in behaviour within the same species are not just an accident of nature but an expression of animal personality and part of a complex evolutionary strategy.
May 30, 2007
The problem highlights a general issue in evolutionary biology of what determines the range of plants and animals we see compared to those that might have evolved theoretically.
May 24, 2007
Passion and perseverance may be more important to success than mere talent. In a world of instant gratification, grit may yield the biggest payoff of all.
May 23, 2007
Sexual orientation has a real effect on how we perform mental tasks such as navigating with a map in a car but that old age withers all men's minds alike just ahead of women's.
May 22, 2007
Why conservatives had happy childhoods but liberals have more sex.
May 15, 2007
When it comes to percentages, consumer calculating errors can be costly.
May 15, 2007
In the most thorough study to date of the Neanderthal genome, scientists suggest an early human-Neanderthal split.
May 11, 2007
When male primates tussle and females develop their social skills it leaves a permanent mark—on their brains.
May 10, 2007
Researchers have produced new DNA evidence that almost certainly confirms the theory that all modern humans have a common ancestry.
May 8, 2007
A new study showed that a certain form of neuropsin, a protein that plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous systems of humans and that it originated less than 5 million years ago.
May 7, 2007
Winning an Academy Award almost guarantees an actor more fame, money, and scripts. Now a new study adds another perk: evolutionary fitness.
May 4, 2007
Mirror neurons, it seems, are of the utmost importance in human mind, and on the tip of the collective psychological tongue.
May 4, 2007
The X chromosome is a rich repository of genes vital to brain development and could hold the key to the evolution of our particularly corrugated cortex. It is a supple, switchbacking, multitasking patch of the genome.
May 3, 2007
Millions of years ago, climate change shaped the evolution of the human species. An audio report from NPR's All Things Considered.
April 30, 2007
Birds have shown they can plan for a future state of mind.
April 26, 2007
Man's brains and nervous system may have been inherited from a worm.
April 23, 2007
Chimpanzees from different parts of Africa are genetically more diverse than all of humanity, researchers report.
April 20, 2007
Observed in the wild and tested in captivity, chimpanzees invite comparison with humans. Scientists see increasing evidence of similarities in chimp behavior and skills, making some of them think on the vagaries of evolution.
April 18, 2007
Since the human-chimp split about 6 million years ago, chimpanzee genes can be said to have evolved more than human genes, a new study suggests.
April 16, 2007
Men’s and women’s brains "fire" differently when they are planning how to reach for something.
April 10, 2007
Chimpanzees in the West African nation of Senegal take shelter from the scorching heat in caves. The discovery has raised chatter among primate researchers, who say it's the first known case of regular cave use by an ape species.
April 9, 2007
House buyers today usually peruse properties with a checklist of desired features in mind. This aspect of human behavior has apparently not changed much over the millennia.
April 6, 2007
Most people want to be normal. So, when we are given information that underscores our deviancy, the natural impulse is to get ourselves as quickly as we can back toward the center.
April 5, 2007
Our brains evolved computational programs to evaluate choices in terms of their value and efficiency: Those that accurately estimate the costs and the long-term benefits of choices will be more efficient than those that don't.
April 4, 2007
Ancient remains of an early modern human found in Beijing suggests the Out of Africa theory of the dispersal of humans may be more complex than first thought, a study suggests.
April 3, 2007
The next time you are struggling to carry your bags home from the supermarket just remember that this could, in fact, be the reason you are able to walk upright on two legs at all!
April 2, 2007
Adult minds are so keen at spotting race, gender and age that we can correctly guess those features from nothing more than a black-and-white silhouette, new experiments show.
March 29, 2007
Behind every wave of disgust that comes your way may be a biological imperative much greater than the urge to lose your lunch.
March 26, 2007
Testosterone-fuelled people seem to enjoy provoking anger in others
March 23, 2007
Research suggests that stone-banging by South American monkeys could be a socially-learned skill.
March 21, 2007
What is the very best way to learn a complex task? Is it practice, practice, practice, or is watching and thinking enough to let you imitate a physical activity, such as skiing or ballet?
March 20, 2007
Over the past two centuries, people have had to disabuse themselves about various ideologies asserting that humans are fundamentally different from other animals.
March 19, 2007
Through controlled experiments a psychologist explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits is hard work.
March 12, 2007
Scientists have known for years that the energy cost of walking and running is related primarily to the work done by muscles to lift and move the limbs. But how much energy does it actually take to get around?
March 9, 2007
Using sex to sell a product does not work—particularly for women.
March 6, 2007
Scientists tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain. (May require free registration.)
March 2, 2007
Flexibly drawing inferences about the intentions of other individuals in order to cooperate in complex tasks is a basic part of everyday life that we humans take for granted. But this ability is present in other species as well.
February 26, 2007
A new study, certain to be controversial, maintains that chimpanzees and humans split from a common ancestor just 4 million years ago—a much shorter time than current estimates of 5 million to 7 million years ago.
February 22, 2007
Everlasting satisfaction is nearly impossible, says a new study. But it might be tantalisingly close for many of us.
February 16, 2007
When making tough choices about terrorism, troop surges or crime, we usually go with our gut.
February 15, 2007
People are born with "kinship detectors" that help us stay away from romantic entanglements with our siblings that could lead to evolutionary disaster.
February 14, 2007
Why do we see faces everywhere we look: in the moon, in Rorschach inkblots, in the interference patterns on the surface of oil spills? Compelling answers are beginning to emerge from biologists and computer scientists.
February 13, 2007
Researchers have found evidence that chimpanzees from West Africa were cracking nuts with stone tools before the advent of agriculture, thousands of years ago.
February 2, 2007
Through an online survey of more than 2,000 people, psychologists have found that we perceive the minds of others along two distinct dimensions: agency and morality.
February 1, 2007
When gambling, people dwell more on losing big than winning big, a new study finds.
January 31, 2007
It's a mystery why the speed and complexity of evolution appear to increase with time.
January 30, 2007
Early humans probably had words for just two colors, and many not-so-ancient languages divide colors into just three categories. Even today, most languages don't have different words for green and blue. But the vocabulary of color has evolved.
January 26, 2007
Psychologists are learning more about how colour builds language and language builds colour.
January 25, 2007
New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking—the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick—are far more common than people acknowledge.
January 24, 2007
A year-long quest to identify the worst sound in the world ended yesterday with top honours going to the backdrop of market town Britain on a Saturday night: a person vomiting.
January 16, 2007
People's shopping behaviour seems to have piggy-backed on old neural circuits evolved for anticipation of reward and the avoidance of hazards.
January 15, 2007
More than just fun, study suggests the best platforms fulfill basic psychological needs.
January 12, 2007
Modern humans who first arose in Africa had moved into Europe as far back as about 45,000 years ago, 5,000 earlier than previously thought.
January 9, 2007
For more than a decade, Nina G. Jablonski has been trying to get her arms around a ubiquitous and yet mysterious topic: the biology, evolution and social function of human skin.
January 8, 2007
A study has found that you are more likely to perform well if you do not think too hard and instead trust your instincts.
January 3, 2007
We can recognize a piece of music from hearing only one note. How do we do this? Why are we so good at recognizing music?
January 2, 2007
Can't work out why you suddenly lose all co-ordination when you hit the dancefloor? Well, at last there is some good news. It's not your fault—blame your mother.
January 2, 2007
Despite the explosive growth in size and complexity of the human brain, the pace of evolutionary change among the thousands of genes expressed in brain tissue has actually slowed.
December 22, 2006
Picasso and peacocks both put on a show for sex. Like flashy tail feathers, men often use creative displays to attract partners. But men want creative mates too, so why have all famous muses from the Greek nymphs to Yoko Ono been female?
December 20, 2006
What do dog barks have in common with bird tweets and human baby cries? All appear to communicate basic emotions, such as fear, aggression and submission in somewhat the same acoustic way.
December 13, 2006
If you see two people laughing at a joke you didn’t hear, chances are you will smile anyway—even if you don’t realize it.
November 30, 2006
There are many good reasons to believe that we all have our own unique smell.
November 27, 2006
The seemingly chaotic way we search reflects an inherited and highly effective strategy that evolved to help us seek out food and water.
November 23, 2006
New investigations into the code for life suggest the assumption that humans are genetically almost identical is wide of the mark, and the implications could be resounding.
November 16, 2006
Researchers have sequenced DNA from the leg bone of a Neanderthal man who died 38,000 years ago and say it shows the Neanderthals are truly distant relatives of modern humans who interbred rarely, if at all, with our own immediate ancestors.
November 10, 2006
Researchers may have answered one of neuroscience's most vexing questions—how can it be that our neurons, which are responsible for our crystal-clear thoughts, seem to fire in utterly random ways?
November 9, 2006
Social exclusion actually causes changes in a person's brain function and can lead to poor decision-making and a diminished learning ability.
November 8, 2006
Of all primates, human eyes are the most conspicuous; our eyes see, but they are also meant to be seen.
November 6, 2006
Micro-RNA, snippets of RNA that control gene expression, could be what makes the difference between us and chimps.
April 1, 2006
The unusual behavior of orangutans in a Sumatran swamp suggests a surprising answer.
March 21, 2006
Can openers, scissors and spiral-bound notebooks discriminate against lefties. Despite such challenges, 10 to 12 percent of the human population has historically preferred the left hand. Why doesn't the number ever waiver?
March 23, 2006
Contrary to traditional wisdom, being a leftie promotes survival from attacks, at least in the world of snails and crabs.
February 26, 2006
The modern gentleman may prefer blondes. But new research has found that it was cavemen who were the first to be lured by flaxen locks.
January 5, 2006
A once-neglected statistical technique may help to explain how the mind works
November 1, 2006
How homosexuality, widespread in the animal kingdom, may have evolved.
October 31, 2006
For all of their stomach-turning gore, horror films and haunted houses attract people in droves.
October 31, 2006
Whether humans are born with certain innate abilities to understand spatial relationships in the wider world is a question that has troubled thinkers at least as far back as Aristotle.
October 26, 2006
Our ability to detect the characteristic metallic smell left on the skin after handling iron-containing objects like coins and keys may have evolved for a more gory purpose: to help our hunter ancestors track down wounded prey.
September 20, 2006
Specialized brain cells known as mirror neurons activate both when we observe the actions of others and when we simply read sentences describing the same action.
October 12, 2006
Donating to charity rewards the brain.
July 24, 2006
New findings raise the interesting possibility that the step from a tree-dwelling ape to a terrestrial biped might not have been as drastic as previously thought.
September 21, 2006
Green vegetables really do taste horrible.
August 29, 2006
The notion that the tongue is mapped into four areas—sweet, sour, salty and bitter—is wrong. There are five basic tastes identified so far, and the entire tongue can sense all of these tastes more or less equally.
August 24, 2006
Researchers have identified the cells and the receptor responsible for sour taste, the primary gateway in all mammals for the detection of spoiled and unripe food sources.
August 2, 2006
The huge brains that set humans apart from other animals could have evolved so that our ancestors could think quickly to avoid being eaten.
August 2, 2006
Chimps and large predatory cats are more likely to target dimwitted prey less capable of escaping attack, a new study reports.
July 25, 2006
Language centers in the brains of rhesus macaques light up when the monkeys hear calls and screams from fellow monkeys, researchers said in a study that suggests language skills evolved early in primates.
August 7, 2006
Using advanced brain sensor technology researchers have confirmed often-debated findings from 1992 that showed infants as young as six months know when an arithmetic solution is wrong.
August 3, 2006
Irrational behaviour arises as a consequence of emotional reactions evoked when faced with difficult decisions. This suggests that rational behaviour may stem from an ability to override automatic emotional responses, rather than an absence of emotion per se.
July 19, 2006
The ability to spot venomous snakes may have played a major role in the evolution of monkeys, apes and humans.
June 23, 2006
The adage "like a kid at heart" may be truer than we think, since new research is showing that grown-ups are more immature than ever.
June 8, 2006
Men are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them, with one important and suggestive exception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.
June 5, 2006
Entrepreneurs are largely born rather than made, research suggests.
June 1, 2006
The afternoon siesta is not just a cultural tradition in some countries. It's a biological reaction to lunch.
May 24, 2006
People are astonishingly accurate when asked to judge the gender of walking human figures, even when they are represented by 15 small dots of light attached to major joints of the body.
May 16, 2006
Scientists have discovered why some people just can't resist food: the reward centres in some people's brains are particularly sensitive to food advertising and product packaging.
May 3, 2006
Monkeys and humans exhibit similar illogical economic biases.
November 22, 2005
How we look, what we're good at, and also the tasks we can't manage can be blamed largely on genetics. Now researchers have learned that even how you feel is rooted partly in your inherited genes.
November 18, 2005
Deactivating a specific gene transforms meek mice into daredevils, researchers have found.
November 16, 2005
A gene thought to influence perception and susceptibility to drug dependence is expressed more readily in human beings than in other primates, and this difference coincides with the evolution of our species, say scientists.
November 11, 2005
Genes that favour stronger sperm or other aspects of male sexual potency may be exerting a strong influence on human evolution, a recent study suggests.
November 9, 2005
The female hormone oestrogen could give women the edge when it comes to tasks such as safe driving, say researchers.
November 8, 2005
We are primed for pettiness, programmed to notice seemingly inconsequential gradations, but for good reason: Being chronically dissatisfied is an effective stimulus to best your more complacent peers.
November 8, 2005
Women get more of a buzz out of cartoons, a brain-imaging study has found, with their brains feeling more rewarded by a funny joke than those of men.
November 4, 2005
Monkeys have a semantic perception of numbers that is like humans' and which is independent of language.
October 31, 2005
Benjamin Franklin wrote in his 1750 Poor Richard's Almanac that "There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self." The problem of achieving accurate self-knowledge hasn't gotten any easier in 250 years.
October 26, 2005
Natural selection continues to shape our species, reveals what is possibly the most detailed analysis to date of how humans differ from one another at the DNA level.
October 21, 2005
The emotional responses that guide much of human behavior have a tremendous impact on public policy and international affairs, prompting government officials to make decisions in response to a crisis with little regard to the long-term consequences.
October 17, 2005
For centuries the "great chain of being" held a central place in Western thought. Although advocates of evolution may have stripped it of its supernatural summit, this view is with us still.
October 14, 2005
Not knowing where the next meal is coming from can turn poor children into overweight or obese adults.
October 3, 2005
Chimpanzees have a reputation for being noisy, rambunctious animals, but new research indicates that wild chimps possess an enormous amount of self-control, especially in terms of their vocalizations.
September 30, 2005
Gorillas have been seen for the first time using simple tools to perform tasks in the wild.
September 28, 2005
All brains originated from a single common ancestral brain that emerged at least 700 million years ago.
September 23, 2005
A trio of papers that looks at genes which seem to be involved in the evolution of the human brain, showing that it is continuing to evolve.
September 15, 2005
It may be politically incorrect, but genetics researchers have shown that even in the animal kingdom males and females may look at the world very differently.
September 13, 2005
Arithmetic seems to be innate for 5-year-olds, study suggests.
September 12, 2005
Maths model shows why we move the way we do.
September 9, 2005
New variants of two genes that control brain development have swept through much of the human population during the last several thousand years, biologists have found.
September 2, 2005
Buried within the 3 billion DNA "letters" in the chimp genome are the changes that put our ancestors on the pathway to humanity.
September 1, 2005
The human and the chimpanzee Y chromosomes went their separate ways approximately 6 million years ago. But ever since this evolutionary parting, these two chromosomes have experienced different fates.
August 26, 2005
It's true. Pornography can make you blind. Look at a smutty picture and you will suffer from a temporary condition known as emotion-induced blindness.
August 22, 2005
Neurobiologists have pinpointed circuitry in the brains of monkeys that assesses the level of risk in a given action. Their findings could give insights into why humans compulsively engage in risky behaviors.
August 19, 2005
Believe it or not, our modern day Nikes and Reeboks are direct descendents of the first supportive footwear that new research suggests came into use in western Eurasia between 26,000 and 30,000 years ago.
August 11, 2005
If your partner seems to be ignoring you after a flash of nudity on the television screen, it might not be his or her fault: When people are shown violent or erotic images they fail to process what they see immediately afterwards.
August 5, 2005
Emotionally arousing events triggered activity in the amygdala, which then triggers production of a protein called Arc in neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in processing long-term memory.
August 3, 2005
Did you ever wonder why some people can gobble stacks of bacon day after day, without high cholesterol levels to show for it, whereas others seem to get clogged arteries just by looking at fatty foods?
August 2, 2005
While many profess not to care what others think, we are, in the end, creatures who want and need to fit into a social universe.
August 1, 2005
The human brain processes male and female voices differently.
July 27, 2005
How alike are you and your husband or wife—or, you and your best friend? Probably more alike than you realize.
July 25, 2005
Men and women seem to perceive pain in different ways. That may mean they sometimes need different pain-relief drugs.
July 22, 2005
An international team has discovered that mammalian chromosomes have evolved by breaking at specific sites rather than randomly as long thought—and that many of the breakage hotspots are also involved in human cancer.
July 20, 2005
Despite invasions by Saxons, Romans, Vikings, Normans, and others, the genetic makeup of today's white Britons is much the same as it was 12,000 ago, a new book claims.
July 15, 2005
Intelligence may lead to a better paid job and quality of life but, in old age, cleverness has no effect on happiness.
July 14, 2005
A study of around 1,000 Australian and Dutch adolescents has pinpointed specific areas of DNA which researchers believe may explain wide variations in intelligence.
July 1, 2005
Animals often sense danger in advance, an instinct that scientists say we lack. But one researcher says he's identified a brain region in people that may serve as our own version of an early warning system.
June 29, 2005
The human brain anticipates unimportant sensations, such as your own touch, so it can focus on important input like, say, a tarantula crawling up your neck.
June 29, 2005
The swing of golfer Tiger Woods or the hand movements of cellist Yo-Yo Ma seem effortless, in part, because their brain patterns permanently are organized to handle activities associated with golf and music.
June 27, 2005
Brain development may be influenced by genetic parasites.
June 23, 2005
Obsessed with reruns of the TV sitcom Friends? Well then you probably have at least one "Jennifer Aniston cell" in your brain, suggests research on the activity patterns of single neurons in memory-linked areas of the brain.
June 20, 2005
Numerical reasoning seems independent of language.
June 17, 2005
Some regions of the human genome have been hotspots for acquiring duplicated DNA sequences, but only at specific time-points during evolution.
June 14, 2005
The ability to take in visual cues and basically fill in the blanks allows humans to process information very quickly, but new research shows that it also can lead to misperceptions—like seeing things that are not there.
June 10, 2005
The high intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews may be a result of their persecuted past.
June 9, 2005
Standing still when a threat is detected is a defensive, protective reaction. This ancestral and automatic behavior allows the prey to stay unnoticed by a potential predator and is shared by humans as well as animals.
June 7, 2005
Monkeys can match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they expect to see. The finding indicates that numerical perception is truly an abstract concept and not just a function of a particular sense.
June 3, 2005
In a novel approach to testing gender differences in achievement, an Australian researcher has compared the past three decades of male and female international chess results to see if gender differences have diminished with changes in society.
June 1, 2005
The palette that colours our perception of the world is universal, according to a survey of 110 different cultures. So when it comes to choosing the reddest red or the bluest blue, everyone tends to go for the same hue.
May 26, 2005
Empathy with others seems to be due to a type of brain cell called a mirror neuron.
May 16, 2005
Pinker vs. Spelke: A debate on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes.
May 10, 2005
While some psychologists still argue that people perform better when they do something because they want to—rather than for some kind of reward, such as money—Steven Reiss suggests we shouldn't even make that distinction.
May 6, 2005
The new biology is reasserting the primacy of the whole organism—the individual—over the behaviour of isolated genes.
April 29, 2005
It turns out that male and female brains differ quite a bit in architecture and activity.
April 27, 2005
What do the Beatles, the Virgin Mary, Jesus, Patricia Arquette and Michael Keaton all have in common?
April 25, 2005
What is the origin of five digits on most species, and what is the best estimate of why we have that number?
April 20, 2005
When it comes to leadership in the workplace, work teams made up mostly of women tend to share leadership roles more than teams dominated by men.
April 13, 2005
Ancient enzyme acts as an innate nutritionist to influence food choices.
April 6, 2005
A study of adult male twins finds that difference in religiousness are influenced by both genes and environment.
April 1, 2005
As the human brain evolved, humans were able to laugh before they could speak, according to a new study.
March 28, 2005
People are more likely to expect a future surplus of time than they are to expect a future surplus of money.
March 21, 2005
Money doesn't bring happiness—nor do good looks, intelligence or youth. The things that matter most may not be sexy, but they've got a charm all their own.
March 17, 2005
Scientists have deciphered the chromosome that explains the difference between men and women and holds the secrets to at least 300 inherited diseases.
March 16, 2005
When you grab a piece of food and put it in your mouth, smile in response to the smile of a passerby or squint and grimace in anger, the complex pattern of movements that you make may be hard-wired into your brain.
March 1, 2005
Males better at spatial memory, but females quickly catch up, monkey study shows.
February 28, 2005
Our preference for certain products and cultural images that are no longer popular is explained.
February 14, 2005
The latest theory about love from psychological research is that basically the strongly positive associations people have about themselves "spill over" to enhance their attraction to nearly anything associated with the self.
February 11, 2005
People consistently over-commit because they expect to have more time in the future than they do right now.
February 8, 2005
North American adults have problems perceiving and reproducing irregular rhythms. Is it nature or nurture (or both)?
February 7, 2005
Left-handed people really do see the world differently; when shown the same image, left-handed and right-handed people use different parts of the brain.
January 20, 2005
Instinct has the power to hush reason. But when is it safe to go with your gut?
January 14, 2005
Are you empathetic? Or are you a systemizer? That's the fundamental difference between women and men, according to a prickly new theory from psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. To him, autism is a case of the extreme male brain.
January 13, 2005
Language has long been considered one of the defining characteristics for humans, but recent work with Tamarin monkeys and rats suggest that picking up speech cues has a rhythmic quality throughout the mammalian world
January 12, 2005
For millions of years, pain has helped protect humans by alerting them that a serious threat was present. But why are people able to withstand high levels of discomfort while comparable pain causes others to cry for mercy?
January 4, 2005
New evidence suggests that previous studies have underestimated not only the effect of our own negative prophecies, but also the power of others' false beliefs in promoting negative outcomes.
January 3, 2005
While the brain generally gets bigger as you climb the evolutionary tree, the moderate trend becomes a huge leap for human evolution, as the human brain is much larger and more complex than the brains of nonhuman primates.
December 24, 2004
A study of dreams has revealed that when we dream it's usually about social interactions, and that our emotional state in those interactions varies predictably depending on the stage of sleep we're in.
December 23, 2004
Boosting people's sense of self-worth has become a national preoccupation. Yet surprisingly, researchshows that such efforts are of little value in fostering academic progress or preventing undesirable behavior.
December 15, 2004
Perhaps the Beanie Baby craze wasn't so weird after all.
December 10, 2004
Musicality may be restricted to humans alone.
December 8, 2004
The endurance of left-handedness has puzzled researchers, because it is linked to disadvantages including an increased risk of some diseases. But experts say it could be because they do well in combat.
December 7, 2004
Drawing on experiments with blue jays, a team of University of Minnesota researchers has found what may be the evolutionary basis for impulsive behavior.
December 2, 2004
There may be an explanation for why those gym workouts seem not to have any effect—US experts suggest some people benefit less from exercise.
December 1, 2004
A group of researchers has re-created with remarkable accuracy part of the genome of the common ancestor of all placental mammals, a small shrew-like creature that prowled the forests of what is now Asia more than 80 million years ago.
November 30, 2004
People use different parts of their brain when they lie and when they tell the truth and a brain scan can catch the liar out.
November 17, 2004
Our African ancestors may have been talented endurance athletes.
November 16, 2004
A new study suggests that bad habits are automatic, learned behaviors. Those previously learned habits remain stronger in more automatic, unconscious forms of memory.
November 15, 2004
People with a gene variation that dulls their taste buds to bitter flavours drink twice as much alcohol as those with more sensitive palates, suggests a US study.
November 15, 2004
Religious belief is determined by a person's genetic make-up according to a study by Dean H. Hamer, author of The God Gene.
November 5, 2004
What drives a person to hoard perfectly useless objects like bottle caps? The urge to collect may derive from the need so basic it originates in the subcortical and limbic portions of the brain.
October 28, 2004
What is the secret of music's strange power? Seeking an answer, scientists are piecing together a picture of what happens in the brains of listeners and musicians.
October 27, 2004
The things you learned today will likely be consolidated by your brain while you sleep tonight.
October 21, 2004
Levels of hormone exposure in the womb helps determine which academic discipline researchers work in, a new study suggests.
October 14, 2004
Learning other languages altered the area of the brain which processes information in the same way exercise builds muscles.
October 13, 2004
Brain scans of people tasting the soft drinks reveal that knowing which drink they're tasting affects their preference and activates memory-related brain regions that recall cultural influences.
October 11, 2004
Lottery fever has lots of us buying tickets and dreaming of a big payoff. Researchers are looking into what might drive us to the ticket counter.
October 8, 2004
Roughly 80 percent of our cognitive power may be cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us.
October 6, 2004
The most honest answer is that we do not yet know the function or functions of dreaming. But we have some interesting ideas.
October 5, 2004
When it comes to "buying" excuses, women aren't exactly in the market, according to a new study that explores how men and women perceive self-deception.
October 4, 2004
When it comes to self-esteem, big fish are much happier in small ponds.
September 21, 2004
When we volunteer our time to do something for others it can be good news for our health, our children's education and even reduce the local crime rate too.
September 15, 2004
Adult humans and primates are face experts, able to quickly and accurately spot children in a crowded mall or mates in a thick forest. Does the human brain contain a region used exclusively for identifying faces?
September 14, 2004
The following tests were developed by Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Baron-Cohen's theory is that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, and that the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems. So which are you?
September 10, 2004
Challenging decades of scientific belief that the decoding of sound originates from a preferred side of the brain, scientists have demonstrated that right-left differences for the auditory processing of sound start at the ear.
September 8, 2004
Next time you start imitating chimpanzees at the zoo, be aware that they know what you're doing. Researchers report they have the first evidence that animals other than humans can recognise when they're being imitated.
August 31, 2004
Biochemists explain why humans and primates are so closely related genetically, but so clearly different biologically and intellectually.
August 27, 2004
Telling someone off activates a part of the brain which is linked to enjoyment and satisfaction, which might explain why many people reprimanding those who break the rules or abuse their trust.
August 24, 2004
The dualist belief that body and soul are separate entities is natural, intuitive and with us from infancy. It is also very probably wrong.
August 23, 2004
People in a negative mood provide more accurate eyewitness accounts than people in a positive mood state, according to new research.
August 20, 2004
Language may shape human thought suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.
August 19, 2004
Researchers have descended on a small town in Ohio for two frenzied days of work. Twin research has never been so popular.
August 18, 2004
Researchers have shed new light on the neural machinery that controls flinching, a critically important protective mechanism by which animals and humans instantly protect themselves against threats.
August 9, 2004
Any mom or dad can tell you that keeping children busy helps stave off cries of boredom—and now there is scientific backing to prove it.
July 29, 2004
The thing to remember is that rare things happen all the time. It is just probability, helped to look more impressive by our own dodgy instincts.
July 28, 2004
A gene which allows people to see the colour red comes in an unusually high number of variations and sits on the X chromosome, which means women have two copies, and men just one.
July 23, 2004
Babies as young as five months old make distinctions about categories of events that their parents do not, revealing new information about how language develops in humans.
July 14, 2004
A new study suggests that men see colors differently than women do, thanks to natural selection.
July 2, 2004
Scientists have shown how the brain can be fooled into feeling sensations in a fake limb.
June 25, 2004
We spend years of our lives having them but no one knows why; but recent research could finally give us the answer.
June 23, 2004
Evolutionary natural selection produced a majority of individuals with speech and language control in the left hemisphere of the brain--and the left hemisphere controls the right hand.
June 21, 2004
Because females do.
June 15, 2004
Girls shy away from careers in math not because they lack the skills but because they don't see math as useful.
June 9, 2004
"Regrets? I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention." When Frank Sinatra crooned those lyrics in his song "My Way," he probably didn't know that having few regrets is more like "Our Way."
June 4, 2004
Most of us believe we can accurately gauge how our personal performance and abilities stack up against our peers, but new research suggests that we are in fact poor judges of our own comparative talents.
June 3, 2004
Researchers are looking at what happens in our brains when we place a bet.
May 28, 2004
The pursuit of self-esteem has become a central preoccupation of American culture, but the need to prove ourselves often causes more harm than good.
May 25, 2004
Whenever I venture out of the Ivory Tower to deliver public lectures about the brain, by far the most likely question I can expect as the talk winds up is, "Do we really only use 10 percent of our brains?"
May 20, 2004
Scientists studying our brains may have found why mistakes can happen when we try to do too many things at one time.
May 13, 2004
Human beings are more aroused by rewards they actively earn than by rewards they acquire passively.
May 11, 2004
Francis Bacon and experimental psychologists show why the facts in science never just speak for themselves.
May 7, 2004
We may have nothing to fear but fear itself.
April 27, 2004
The Bible Code and similar numerological poppycock rely on the deep connection between how the mind works and how we perceive the world works.
April 26, 2004
The ability to empathise is often considered uniquely human, the result of complex reasoning and abstract thought. But it might in fact be an incredibly simple brain process.
April 26, 2004
The gender difference in appearance memory was not great, but it shows another area where women are superior to men in interpersonal sensitivity.
April 13, 2004
Research reported today has traced two familiar mental phenomena, aesthetic appreciation and insight, to specific locations in the brain.
April 2, 2004
Research shows that memories are experiences that we can have that arise through an interaction between things that really have happened to us in the past and our current expectations and beliefs.
March 31, 2004
Stone Age beads revealed by archaeologists on Wednesday could be the strongest evidence yet that humans developed sophisticated symbolic thought much earlier than once thought.
March 23, 2004
Seemingly incidental emotions can influence the prices at which individuals buy and sell goods, according to a groundbreaking study.
March 15, 2004
We have more control over our mental health than we think.
March 15, 2004
It is thought that if the brain is busy focusing on many aspects of a task, then it has to spread its resources thinly, and pays less heed to time passing.
March 12, 2004
A group of Israeli researchers monitored the brain activity of volunteers as they watched a movie. The scientists found a surprising answer: Our brains tick together.
February 24, 2004
"Zombie agents"â??that is, routine behaviors we perform without even thinkingâ??highlight the fact that much of what goes on in our heads escapes awareness.
February 13, 2004
The fraction of left-handed people today is about the same as it was during the Ice Age, according to data from prehistoric handprints.
February 12, 2004
Perceptual-blindness experiments challenge the validity of eyewitness testimony and the metaphor of memory as a video recording.
February 10, 2004
A new collaborative study shows that sometimes you can't believe anything that you see.
February 6, 2004
Men and women report feeling more pain if the person inflicting the pain is male, shows a UK study.
February 5, 2004
Some people may be aware that a scene they are looking at has changed without being able to identify what that change is. This could be a newly discovered mode of conscious visual perception, according to the psychologist who discovered it. He has dubbed the phenomenon "mindsight".
February 4, 2004
Scientists trying to unravel the workings of the human brain have discovered for the first time how it plucks speech from other noises, breaks it down and works out more than just the meaning of the words.
January 30, 2004
For a long time the fields of biology and psychology have been quite separate, and only in the last few years people have started thinking about brain imaging and about how the brain and mind relate. But they haven't really thought that much about another part of biology: developmental biology.
January 27, 2004
Does a Rembrandt portrait or a van Gogh still life press some special buttons in every human being's brain? Will a red painting speak to us in ways a blue one never could? Are we wired in ways that make every one of us enjoy a smiling bust and shiver at a frowning one?
January 23, 2004
The last few months have seen a series of notable suicides by scientists. These men all had something in common: they were all intelligent and analytical, and possessed of similar education. Could there be a single theme that helps to explain their identical final decisions?
January 22, 2004
A new study suggests that such fear has been shaped by evolution, stretching back to a time when early mammals had to survive and breed in an environment dominated by reptiles, some of which were deadly.
January 16, 2004
The key cognitive step that allowed humans to become the only animals using language may have been identified, scientists say.
January 12, 2004
Evolutionary psychology holds that shameful feelings are hardwired—strategies that led to success on the Pleistocene savanna. If that's so, then why are they so hard to admit to?
January 9, 2004
Choosing between a new sweater and a pair of concert tickets? Buy the tickets, suggests a new study on whether our spending habits are likely to make us happy.
January 6, 2004
A novel model of human brain aging developed by a UCLA neuroscientist identifies midlife breakdown of myelin, a fatty insulation coating the brain's internal wiring, as a possible key to the onset of Alzheimer's disease later in life.
December 15, 2003
If you're always worried that no matter how hard you try it is never good enough, or you're constantly disappointed in the people you live or work with, you may be caught in a sneaky snare of perfectionism.
December 15, 2003
Our brains instinctively view our shadows as an extension of our bodies, a new research has shown.
December 9, 2003
Matt Savage launched his jazz career by attempting to improve a Schubert sonata. He released his fifth album this year, making guest appearances on the Today show, 20/20, and NPR. Recently, his trio booked two shows at the Blue Note in New York City. He's also a perseverative hyperlexic with pervasive developmental disorder. In May, he will celebrate his 12th birthday.
December 5, 2003
You were abducted by aliens, you saw Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, and then you went up in a balloon. Didn't you?
December 5, 2003
There's truth in the maxim 'laughter is a drug'. A comic cartoon fired up the same brain centre as a shot of cocaine, researchers are reporting.
December 4, 2003
Many stress-related mental illnesses, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), occur at least twice as often in women as in men. While social and cultural factors certainly may contribute to this statistic, potential neurobiological reasons for this discrepancy have been inadequately investigated.
December 2, 2003
Humans are able to feel uncertainty. One of the important questions in the field of animal and human psychology is whether this metacognitive capacity is uniquely human, or whether nonverbal, nonhuman animal species have a level of metacognition that approaches that of humans.
November 20, 2003
Exercise is definitely an important part of a healthy lifestyle. But as this ScienCentral News video reports, researchers are finding that too much exercise may hinder learning and memory.
November 19, 2003
The idea that eating is merely life support doesn't explain our gastronomic trajectory. We begin life as newborns who drink only milk, become babies who happily gum any substance from beer to bugs, then grow into 4-year-olds who throw tantrums when faced with anything more complex than PB&J. As we reach adulthood, we just get stranger, loving foods any rational kid would find repulsive.
November 11, 2003
Until fairly recently, scientists believed that the information gathered by each of the senses—touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste—was processed in separate areas of the brain. Research is now revealing, however, that there is a complex interaction between the senses in the brain&mdsah;an interaction that enables us to understand the world in a unified way.
November 10, 2003
New research shows that when we see an expression of disgust on someone else's face, the same part of our brain—the insula—is activated as when we feel disgust ourselves.
November 5, 2003
A new UCLA study shows that different parts of the brain are stimulated in reaction to pain depending on gender.
November 4, 2003
New research into depression is showing that antidepressants are not only changing the chemicals inside the brain, they actually make the brain grow new cells.
November 4, 2003
Human intelligence has changed the world. Has it also affected how our bodies look? (Requires free registration.)
October 31, 2003
The evolutionary origins of depression suggest tips for overcoming the blues. An appreciation of the evolutionary perspective on depression can help those who are acutely suffering.
October 29, 2003
Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a "brain itch" that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over.
October 22, 2003
Refuting 30 years of scientific theory that solely credits hormones for brain development, UCLA scientists have identified 54 genes that may explain the different organization of male and female brains.
October 20, 2003
People who offer love, listening and help to others may be rewarded with better mental health themselves, according to a new study of churchgoers in the September/October issue of Psychosomatic Medicine.
October 17, 2003
A century ago, most Americans lived to be about 50. Today people over 100 make up the fastest-growing segment of the population. As some researchers bet that children born today will live to be 150, others say there is no upward limit on longevity
October 15, 2003
A research team has identified genes in the cerebral cortex that differ in levels of activity between humans and nonhuman primates, including chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys. These findings may provide essential clues to the unusual cognitive abilities of humans.
October 13, 2003
Walking down a dark alley late at night is enough to give anyone the heebie-jeebies. Your heart starts racing, your palms get clammy and you get ready to run. Now researchers from Boston University have unravelled the neural pathways that transmit information about your surroundings to your organs, enabling them to respond appropriately.
October 13, 2003
A new study in the Oct. 9 issue of the journal Nature describes three distinct stages in the life of a memory, and helps explain how memories endure—or are forgotten—including the role that sleep plays in safeguarding memories.
October 8, 2003
The special sounds and gestures made by infant bonobos—also known as pygmy chimpanzees—when they are tickled suggest that the origins of laughter may pre-date human evolution, according to a new report.
October 7, 2003
It can bring us to tears or to our feet, drive us into battle or lull us to sleep. Music is indeed remarkable in its power over all humankind. Perhaps for that very reason, no human culture on earth has ever lived without it: people making music predates agriculture and perhaps even language.
October 6, 2003
John Downs defines masculinity carefully, gingerly, as if it is both something separate from him and something of which he is a part. It may be a phenomenal truth that most men—secretly or otherwise—are engaged in the same struggle. Either they don't think they measure up to the perceived definitions of masculinity or they actively don't want to. Which leads to questions about why the definitions continue to exist.
October 2, 2003
New research by a group of economists and psychology researchers at the University of Warwick reveals that our rank position within an organisation has a bigger effect on our happiness within that job than the happiness generated by our actual level of pay.
October 1, 2003
The brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition"—defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition.
September 29, 2003
Scientists are developing a new paradigm for how the brain functions. They propose that the brain is not a huge fixed network, as had been previously thought, but a dynamic, changing network that adapts continuously to meet the demands of communication and computational needs.
September 25, 2003
What the data suggest to me is that if one starts with a brain of a certain complexity and gives it enough social and ecological support, that brain will develop at least the building blocks of a complex communication system. Of course, chimpanzees don't proceed to develop full-blown language the way you and I have. Grey parrots, such as Alex and Griffin, are never going to sit here and give an interview the way you and I are conducting an interview and having a chat. But they are going to produce meaningful, complex communicative combinations.
September 24, 2003
If intelligence were always a positive attribute, it would always be selected for by natural selection. But it is not—people and animals have their dolts as well as their Einsteins. | | |
