Stretching your ability to focus is good for the brain. Paying close attention like that encourages the brain to pump more acetylcholine (a brain chemical important for learning, attention, and memory ...

Much has been made of the power of habit. We’re encouraged to make healthy choices our default and to understand the way that the brain sets certain tasks, such as our morning commute, on autopilot to ...

What’s the big idea? Every moment is filled with how we’ve decided to spend our time, and that time defines us. We make value judgements (often automatically) of our options and follow similar ...

Our brains may work best when teetering on the edge of chaos. A new theory suggests that criticality a sweet spot between order and randomness is the secret to learning, memory, and adaptability. When ...

Studying the process of brain formation illuminates just how much of development is a series of tiny miracles. Only a few weeks after a human egg is fertilized, a sheet of cells called the neural ...

Whoever first said the brain is like a muscle was closer to the truth than they probably knew. Spend an hour wrestling with a crossword puzzle, tackling a Sudoku grid, or calculating the area under a ...

UCSF scientists discovered that an overlooked cell type in the brain plays a central role in healing traumatic brain injury.

In 1943, a pair of neuroscientists were trying to describe how the human nervous system works when they accidentally laid the foundation for artificial intelligence. In their mathematical framework ...

New research has found that being overworked can physically alter the brain. Researchers in South Korea set out to understand how working long hours impact the cognitive and emotional health of ...

In a new paper with implications for preventing Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders, Keith Hengen, an associate professor of biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St.