Featured series 
Tag: Neuroscience
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Nation & World
Daniel Gilbert’s ‘Stumbling on Happiness’ lands top book prize
Daniel Gilbert’s pursuit of the scientific basis of happiness has won him the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, it was announced on Tuesday (May 15). “Stumbling on Happiness,” which draws on psychology and neuroscience, as well as personal experience, explores the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy. Gilbert, who is a professor…
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Nation & World
Advances in genetics can help kids learn
Education was becoming a no-brainer, some people at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE) complained. Kurt Fischer and his colleagues looked at the revolution in brain scanning, genetics, and other biological technologies and decided that most teachers and students weren’t getting much benefit from them.
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Nation & World
Smile and the world smiles with you, but why?
“We are connected in ways we don’t consciously know, but which are absolutely essential for communication,” said psychologist and author Daniel Goleman at a March 14 talk on social intelligence sponsored by the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Center for Public Leadership. “There is a subterranean emotional economy that’s part of any interaction.”
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Nation & World
Study shows importance of sleep for optimal memory functioning
Harvard researchers have tracked fatigue’s footsteps on the human brain, showing that sleeplessness impairs the ability to learn new information and that abnormal brain function, not reduced alertness, is the cause.
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Nation & World
Symposium: ‘Will brain imaging be lie detector test of the future?’
For almost a century, one of the staples of crime stories has been the wires, cuffs, and jiggling recording needle of the polygraph machine. In its time, the “lie detector” was hailed as a way to measure the telltale physiological signs of deception, including hard breathing, high blood pressure, and excess perspiration. But in truth,…
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Nation & World
Brain pollution: Common chemicals are damaging young minds
Learning disabilities. Cerebral palsy. Mental retardation. A “silent pandemic” of these and other neurodevelopmental disorders is under way owing to industrial chemicals in the environment that impair brain development in fetuses and young children. That’s the conclusion of a data analysis by researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and the Mount Sinai…
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Nation & World
Martin wins prize for research, innovation
Internationally renowned Canadian neuroscientist Joseph B. Martin, dean of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine, was recently named the inaugural winner of the Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research.
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Nation & World
Nanowire arrays can detect signals along individual neurons
Opening a whole new interface between nanotechnology and neuroscience, scientists at Harvard University have used slender silicon nanowires to detect, stimulate, and inhibit nerve signals along the axons and dendrites of live mammalian neurons.
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Nation & World
Meditation found to increase brain size
People who meditate grow bigger brains than those who don’t. Researchers at Harvard, Yale, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found the first evidence that meditation can alter the physical structure of our brains. Brain scans they conducted reveal that experienced meditators boasted increased thickness in parts of the brain that deal with attention…