By Alison Gopnik, the New York Times An excerpt: Humphrey, an emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics, may not have solved the mind-body problem, and there is something to be said for the awkward geekery of philosophical analysis and experimental data. But he has some really...

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 Benedict Carey, The New York Times Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For...

By Colin McGinn, The New York Review of Books 3/24/2011 Excerpt: Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on...

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...

Barry Schwartz, TED Talk A summary: In an intimate talk, Barry Schwartz dives into the question "How do we do the right thing?" With help from collaborator Kenneth Sharpe, he shares stories that illustrate the difference between following the rules and truly choosing wisely. See the talk ....

From the New York Times A summary: Scientists have found indications that your ability to jump to intuitive answers — what they term the “Aha!” moment — may be affected by your mood. After watching a humorous video, brain imaging and test results of subjects suggested that a positive mood prepares the...

By Benedict Carey 12/6/2010, The New York Times The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes...

by Katherine Harmon, Scientific American Gray Matter Shows Introspective Ability Is Not Black and White When answering a question, your accuracy in assessing whether you have gotten the answer right—or wrong—might depend on the volume of gray matter in a certain part of your brain, according to a new...

By Claudia Dreifus from The New York Times " Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior...

By Antonino Raffone, Angela Tagini, and Narayanan Srinivasan Abstract: Mindfulness can be understood as the mental ability to focus on the direct and immediate perception or monitoring of the present moment with a state of open and nonjudgmental awareness. Descriptions of mindfulness and methods for...

By D. Larriviere and M. A. Williams Abstract: Neuroenhancement (NE) refers to the use of prescription medications by healthy persons to boost their cognitive skills. This growing phenomenon represents a potential market not only for pharmaceutical manufacturers but also for physicians who might enter...

by Torsten Zesch and Iryna Gurevych In this article, we present a comprehensive study aimed at computing semantic relatedness of word pairs. We analyze the performance of a large number of semantic relatedness measures proposed in the literature with respect to different experimental conditions, such...

Moral Judgments Recruit Domain-General Valuation Mechanisms to Integrate Representations of Probability and Magnitude By Amitai Shenhav and Joshua D. Greene "Many important moral decisions, particularly at the policy level, require the evaluation of choices involving outcomes of variable magnitude...

Stephen S. Hall "A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue. We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science...

Stephan Schleim , Tade M. Spranger , Susanne Erk, Henrik Walter Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral...

By Ralph Adolphs Social neuroscience has been enormously successful and is making major contributions to fields ranging from psychiatry to economics. Yet deep and interesting conceptual challenges abound. Is social information processing domain specific? Is it universal or susceptible to individual differences...

Elizabeth Tricomi, Antonio Rangel, Colin F. Camerer, John P. O’Doherty A popular hypothesis in the social sciences is that humans have social preferences to reduce inequality in outcome distributions because it has a negative impact on their experienced reward. Although there is a large body of behavioural...

Marc Hauser and Justin Wood We synthesize the contrasting predictions of motor simulation and teleological theories of action comprehension and present evidence from a series of studies showing that monkeys and apes—like humans—extract the meaning of an event by ( a ) going beyond the surface appearance...

Reka Daniel and Stefan Pollmann The dopaminergic system is known to play a central role in reward-based learning (Schultz, 2006), yet it was also observed to be involved when only cognitive feedback is given (Aron et al., 2004). Within the domain of information-integration category learning, in which...