How psychologists study the flow state
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi found flow by interviewing climbers, dancers and writers. Fifty years on, labs still struggle to catch it.
tag archive
#neuroscience.
Every story tagged #neuroscience.
Learning London's streets grows a cabbie's hippocampus
Trainee London cabbies who pass The Knowledge grow a larger posterior hippocampus. Those who fail do not, a UCL study of 79 trainees found.
The two kinds of hyperhidrosis, and what causes each
Most heavy sweating is a normal response to heat or stress. Primary hyperhidrosis has no known cause. The secondary kind is a symptom of another illness.
The brain that changes itself, and what keeps it steady
Neuroplasticity, once dismissed, is now core brain science. Neuron timing strengthens or weakens links, and with too much change no memory would form.
A rubber hand can start to feel like your own
Seeing a fake hand stroked in time with your hidden real one makes the brain claim it. It works only if the fake hand sits where a real arm could.
Two spoken languages leave a mark on the brain's grey matter
A Georgetown study found more grey matter in executive-control regions of Spanish-English speakers. Bilinguals of sign and speech showed no such gain.
A ventriloquist never throws a voice, the audience's eyes do
The sound comes from the performer's own mouth. The audience's eyes pin it on the dummy's moving mouth, and performers are using that trick again.
You dream for about two hours a night, and nobody knows why
Science has no single answer to why we dream. Threat rehearsal, emotional repair, memory sorting and creative search each have evidence behind them.