New Scientist locates the specific place where knowledge and self-awareness sits – in a brain region called the claustrum:

In a study published last week, Mohamad Koubeissi at the George Washington University in Washington DC and his colleagues describe how they managed to switch a woman’s consciousness off and on by stimulating her [...]

Stop studying. Take a nap. That’s the message from Catholic University of Leuven researchers who found that one more hour of sleep makes a big difference to your grade:

Additionally, the number of hours slept – and not the quality of sleep during that time – played a significant role in exam performance. “Students who [...]

Science Daily has MRI proof that all those *boring* scales help switch on problem-solving, better-judgement brain areas:

Executive functions are the high-level cognitive processes that enable people to quickly process and retain information, regulate their behaviors, make good choices, solve problems, plan and adjust to changing mental demands.

“Since executive functioning is a strong predictor [...]

Nature reveals that sometimes our mouths really do move faster than our brains:

But some researchers think that speech is not entirely planned, and that people know what they are saying in part through hearing themselves speak.

So cognitive scientist Andreas Lind and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden wanted to see what would [...]

Science magazine turns on yet another way electromagnetism can alter the way we think and remember – by switching on vivid visual hallucinations:

A 22-year-old male was receiving deep brain stimulation to isolate where his daily seizures originated. His disorder appeared after he caught West Nile virus at the age of 10 and subsequently [...]

New Scientist has an amazing new therapy for patients in a vegetative state – using the same direct current-stimulation that increases creative “flow” to turn their brains back on all the way:

The team worked with 55 people who had experienced a traumatic brain injury or lack of oxygen to the brain and were in [...]

At least if we’re flies, it does. Nature has more on the laser beam that puts flies in the mood for love:

Optogenetics — triggering neurons with light — has been successful in mice but has not been pursued much in flies, says Barry Dickson, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm [...]

Nature explains the unusual effects that chloride ions can have on our developing brains, and what that means for a drug that seems to help autistic kids socialize:

The findings, reported today in Science, do not suggest that autism spectrum disorders can be prevented in children. But researchers not involved in the study say [...]

Science Daily reveals the tricks that the present plays on our memories:

This the first study to show specifically how memory is faulty, and how it can insert things from the present into memories of the past when those memories are retrieved. The study shows the exact point in time when that incorrectly recalled [...]