By Douglas Fox, Scientific American An excerpt: ... One might think, for example, that evolutionary processes could increase the number of neurons in our brain or boost the rate at which those neurons exchange information and that such changes would make us smarter. But several recent trends of investigation...

By David Zax, Fast Company Brain scanning techniques, like MRI and PET, have opened new provinces of neuroscience. It's nearly impossible to read an article about the brain without seeing the familiar heat maps featuring which parts of the brain "light up" during a given task. But there's...

by Elizabeth Landau for CNN "Henry Molaison, known as H.M. in scientific literature, was perhaps the most famous patient in all of brain science in the 20th century. "My daddy's family came from the South and moved North, they came from Thibodaux Louisiana, and moved north," Molaison...

By Rebecca Saxe | TED.com "Sensing the motives and feelings of others is a natural talent for humans. But how do we do it? Here, Rebecca Saxe shares fascinating lab work that uncovers how the brain thinks about other peoples' thoughts -- and judges their actions." Watch the video . Image...

By Jessica Hamzelo | New Scientist "A mere glimmer of consciousness is all that's required to learn something new. Experiments inspired by Russian psychologist Ivan Pavlov have revealed that some people who are "minimally conscious" can learn to associate a sound with a sensation....

By Joshua Hartshorne | Scientific American "My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable...

By Azeen Ghorahi " 'The human brain has been terra incognita for as long as we’ve known it,' says Olaf Sporns, a professor of neuroscience at Indiana University. In 2005, Sporns co-authored a paper attributing the large-scale shortcomings of comprehensive neuroscience research to a lack...

By Jack Soll and Richard Larrick from Scientific American. "There is an old saying that two heads are better than one. This saying received empirical support in social psychology in the 1920s, when a series of studies showed that groups were more accurate than their individual members. In an early...

By: Charles Q. Choi from Scientific American "Humans often make irrational choices when faced with challenging decisions. Ant colonies, however, can make perfectly rational selections when confronted by tough dilemmas. This isn't because lone ants are especially knowledgeable—they're not...

By Tom Wujec "Last year at TED we aimed to try to clarify the overwhelming complexity and richness that we experience at the conference in a project called the Big Viz. And the Big Viz is a collection of 650 sketches that were made by two visual artists. David Sibbet from The Grove, and Kevin Richards...

By Joanne C. Giblin Abstract: This article defines wisdom and despair as choices for cognitively intact older adults. Some individuals are able to integrate the conditions of old age while others respond in ways that inhibit effective integration. The conscious aging theory, as well as Erikson's...

By Joshua M. Ackerman, Christopher C. Nocera, John A. Bargh "Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means of information acquisition and environmental manipulation. Physical touch experiences may create an ontological scaffold for the development of intrapersonal and interpersonal...

Abstract: Planning for a future, rather than a current, mental state is a cognitive process generally viewed as uniquely human. Here, however, I shall report on a decade of observations of spontaneous planning by a male chimpanzee in a zoo. The planning actions, which took place in a calm state, included...

This paper is about the evolution of hominin intelligence. I agree with defenders of the social intelligence hypothesis in thinking that externalist models of hominin intelligence are not plausible: such models cannot explain the unique cognition and cooperation explosion in our lineage, for changes...

We argue for attention to the evolutionary origins of economic behavior. Going beyond this, we argue that the economy of hunting and gathering was the context in which evolution shaped human characteristics that underlie modern economic behavior. We first reconsider the basic biological question of why...

In most studies to date, innovations were studied if their origination was witnessed or if they arose in response to a pronounced environmental change, making it difficult to generalize. In this study, we use an operational definition developed by Ramsey et al. (MS) to design a procedure for recognizing...

This review traces the development of the field of cultural primatology from its origins in Japan in the 1950s to the present. The field has experienced a number of theoretical and methodological influences from diverse fields, including comparative experimental psychology, Freudian psychoanalysis, behavioral...

Vienna’s Institute of Experimental Biology, better known as the Vivarium, helped pioneer the quantification of experimental biology from 1903 to 1938. Among its noteable scientists were the director Hans Przibram and his brother Karl (a physicist), Paul Kammerer, Eugen Steinach, Paul Weiss, and Karl...

The ability to distinguish self from non-self is one of the fundamental organizing principles of life on Earth. Such recognition systems permit the unification of dis- tinct elements into cohesive social groups, from multicellular organisms to colonial “superorganisms”. Although the phenomenon of self...

This paper reviews behavioural, neurological and cognitive correlates of innovation at the individual, population and species level, focusing on birds and primates. Innovation, new or modified learned behaviour not previously found in the population, is the first stage in many instances of cultural transmission...