As Madeline Lancaster lifts a clear plastic dish into the light, roughly a dozen clumps of tissue the size of small baroque pearls bob in a peachcolored liquid. These are cerebral organoids, which possess certain features of a human brain in the first trimester of development—including lobes of cortex (Russ Juskalian, MIT Technology Review). Continue reading Meet the Organoids: Growing Human Brains in a Petri Dish
There is so much bacteria in your gut that they can easily outweigh your brain. In recent years, researchers have found that the bacteria in our gut communicate with the brain and vice versa. Now we want to know how this communication takes place, whether the food we eat is altering our gut bacteria, and what types of signals they are sending to the brain. Continue reading It’s a Gut Feeling: What is our Gut Bacteria telling our Brain?
Why this question is essentially equivalent to the mind-body problem and what we can learn about it from philosophy, machine learning and even mathematics. Continue reading Can we ever understand the brain?
Ever stood in awe of North Korea’s cheerleaders, or chuckled at old pictures of mom’s perm and dad’s extravagant mustache, wondering how much of your behavior is a product of your immediate social environment? Continue reading Same same but different: Social norms and the brain
Although presence is an everyday phenomenon of being in the here and now, alive in a real world, the same concept is applied to the feeling of being inside VR. Here we will concentrate only on the experience of presence inside VR. Continue reading Presence in Virtual Reality: Why does it feel so real?
Why does our tendency to take risks peak in adolescence? When taking a closer look, recklessness in adolescence may be critical for the development of our identity. Continue reading Taking the leap – new perspectives on risk-taking in adolescence
There is so much bacteria in your gut that they can easily outweigh your brain. In recent years, researchers have found that the bacteria in our gut communicate with the brain and vice versa. Now we want to know how this communication takes place, whether the food we eat is altering our gut bacteria, and what types of signals they are sending to the brain. Continue reading It’s a Gut Feeling: What is our Gut Bacteria telling our Brain?
Most of us have experienced aesthetic reactions to music– everyone knows how it feels to react to a song so emotionally that you get goosebumps and think “This music is so beautiful.” Continue reading More than a feeling – insights from brain research on the aesthetic experience of music
Brainy Sundays 