Neuroscience

Cognitive dissonance helps old dogs with their new tricks

Suzanne Cope

Our world outsmarts us

Social problems are fantastically complex, while human minds are severely under-engineered. Is democracy doomed?

Robert Burton

Why is the brain prone to florid forms of confabulation?

Jules Montague

The brain-heart dialogue shows how racism hijacks perception

Manos Tsakiris

Touched

We ride a stream of naked neurons, stripped of their sheaths, to the most blissful moments and deepest intimacies of life

Steven M Phelps

A happy life is built on pleasures such as sex and food, but also company and variety

7 minutes

The bilingual brain: why one size doesn’t fit all

Angela Grant

Optical illusions show how past experience dramatically influences perception

4 minutes

Dishonesty gets easier on the brain the more you do it

Neil Garrett

How the ‘Island of the Colourblind’ made Oliver Sacks rethink ‘normal’

6 minutes

On shared false memories: what lies behind the Mandela effect

Caitlin Aamodt

Living in the now

She can paint, but not name a painting; learn new music without knowing a tune. Lonni Sue is teaching us much about memory.

Michael D Lemonick

Maps in the head

How animals navigate their way around provides clues to how the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories

Kate Jeffery

Five-month-old babies know what’s funny

Gina Mireault

Here’s looking at you

Filmmakers have tapped laws of perception still unexplored by neuroscience to create a visual feast in the brain

Jeffrey M Zacks

Final decision? Why the brain keeps on changing its mind

Stephen M Fleming

The lizard inside

Like a reptile lodged within me, paranoia hatches unbelievable conspiracies that my mind embraces with stunning naivety

Roberta Payne

How the sounds of solitary confinement might be worse than the isolation

3 minutes

Mesmerising

Look into my eyes: the fantastical history, mysterious healing power and emergent neuroscience of hypnosis

Erik Vance

How video games unwittingly train the brain to justify killing

Teodora Stoica

Some people really are wired better for learning languages

Angela Grant

The open mind

The most vivid part of the mind bubbles up through sensation and new experience when unencumbered by analytical thought

Daniel J Siegel

How the cute Pikachu is a chocolate milkshake for the brain

Joel Frohlich

Music of the mind: a stunning string quartet created through brainwaves

9 minutes

Some patients in a vegetative state can still communicate

Tommaso Bruni

How a mother’s voice shapes her baby’s developing brain

Kate Fehlhaber

What will we do when neuroimaging allows us to reconstruct dreams and memories?

4 minutes