British artist Andrew Carnie, the focus of this month’s Beautiful Brain Podcast, often creates work that is time-based in nature, involving 35mm slide projections onto complex screen configurations. Here we feature his work in an exclusive online gallery.
In this month’s podcast, Noah Hutton speaks with British artist Andrew Carnie, whose current installation at the GV Art Gallery in London uses slide projections to explore the evolving narrative of the brain.
The universality of the pentatonic scale in world music is not a new idea. However, the idea that it could be rooted in our biology is more controversial. Sam explores the debate surrounding the biological basis of music.
Noah Hutton reports on his recent trip to the SciFoo conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. The annual event, co-hosted by Nature, O’Reilly Media and Google, brings leading scientists and thinkers from around the world to spend a weekend taking risks.
What is the role of conscious versus unconscious thought in the act of committing a crime? Neuroscientist Joe LeDoux discusses the application of modern neuroscience to the justice system through his own science and music.
Noah Hutton reports on his recent trip to the SciFoo conference at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. The annual event, co-hosted by Nature, O’Reilly Media and Google, brings leading scientists and thinkers from around the world to spend a weekend taking risks.
What is the role of conscious versus unconscious thought in the act of committing a crime? Neuroscientist Joe LeDoux discusses the application of modern neuroscience to the justice system through his own science and music.
Are we free to choose? Is all behavior determined? Do you have to be conscious of a decision in order for it to be considered volitional? Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux weaves music and brain science to take on the deepest questions of human existence.
British artist Andrew Carnie, the focus of this month’s Beautiful Brain Podcast, often creates work that is time-based in nature, involving 35mm slide projections onto complex screen configurations. Here we feature his work in an exclusive online gallery.
Elizabeth Jameson found her art when her own brain lost one of its most basic functions. After being diagnosed with MS, Jameson took the medical images of her own brain and began to create the stunning pieces we present in this exclusive online gallery of her work.
Pablo Garcia Lopez’s mixed media art is inspired by the words of the great Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramon y Cajal.
Ben reviews a recent lecture by Yale cognitive scientist Paul Bloom on the meaning of art and its role as a language of the emotions.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the Nobel Prize in 1906 for discovering that the nerve cell is distinctly individual. Ben Ehrlich examines the artistic ambitions that developed before maturity. The essay features unpublished drawings and paintings from this formative phase, long before Cajal became one of the most distinguished individuals in the history of science.
Can artists be said to have truly predicted scientific discoveries through their art? Proceed with caution.
In this month’s podcast, Noah Hutton speaks with British artist Andrew Carnie, whose current installation at the GV Art Gallery in London uses slide projections to explore the evolving narrative of the brain.
Reality may be a persistent illusion; so is the way we think about it, says psychology researcher Daniel Simons, co-author of The Invisible Gorilla. In this edition of The Beautiful Brain Podcast, Simons discusses the research behind his new book, which grew out of a simple experiment about attention, or lack thereof.
How does a constellation of neurons store a memory over a lifetime? Could this system of storage be selectively edited to enhance pleasurable memories and delete painful ones? (Think “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” a film based largely on this research). In this episode of the podcast, Noah Hutton interviews Todd Sacktor about his cutting-edge research.
The universality of the pentatonic scale in world music is not a new idea. However, the idea that it could be rooted in our biology is more controversial. Sam explores the debate surrounding the biological basis of music.
In keeping with this week’s theme of free will and consciousness, Sam explores some new research on the neuroscience of voluntary action.
Addiction is hard to define. Does it merely refer to any uninhibited behavior that is habitually repeated? Sam McDougle discusses the neuroscience of addiction.
Ben Ehrlich, who had his own encounter with an invisible gorilla, reviews the new book “The Invisible Gorilla,” which argues for the presence of some common illusions when it comes to our own thinking.
Alan Alda hosted a discussion at the World Science Festival on Saturday evening that featured Charlie Kaufman and consciousness researcher Giulio Tononi.
Contributor Ben Ehrlich reviews Cajal’s Butterflies of the Soul (2010) by Javier DeFelipe, published by Oxford University Press.
No two neurons are the same. Even neurons of the same type (i.e. purkinje cells) behave differently. This fact is often overlooked as an important functional feature of the brain, and instead chalked up to biological impreciseness. In their recent Nature article, 
Krishnan Padmanabhan and Nathaniel Urban think there’s an important reason behind all the diversity. They studied the “intrinsic differences” in the molecular signatures and firing behaviors of mitral cells in the mouse olfactory bulb, and by differentially stimulating different cells concluded that:
Although a number of mechanisms have been proposed to account for the origin and extent of these intrinsic differences, we found that differences in intrinsic biophysical heterogeneity can be important [for] neural coding.
In other words, the intrinsic differences between neurons are not biological mistakes – they are adaptive functions for the complex neural coding of stimulus information.
100 billion neurons, and each one is functionally different? I’m having trouble coding that one…
image/http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/
