Kids’ brain response to ice cream and a milkshake

How does part of the brain respond when you stuff kids with ice cream over a long period of time and then offer them an ice-cream-filled milkshake? This is the first study to involve a scientist named Burger who investigates that question in the particular way that this study goes about it (Thanks to investigator Gus […]

Taxi driver brains: A further look

Eleanor Maguire has extended the research for which she and her colleagues (David Gadian, Ingrid Johnsrude, Catriona Good, John Ashburner,Richard Frackowiak, and Christopher Frith of University College London) were awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology. The original paper is: “Navigation-Related Structural Change In the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers“, It compared the brains of London taxi drivers—all of […]

What Happens When the Brain Encounters Naughtiness?

When a person thinks about naughty things, does one side of the brain get more exercised than the other? Eight scientists studied that question. Their report, Hemispheric Asymmetries During Processing of Immoral Stimuli, appears in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience. The stated goal is to describe “the neural organisation of moral processing”. Debra Lieberman, a […]

Why brain extraction is not as bad as it sounds

Scientists marvel at how other scientists – the ones who study something other than what they themselves study – give strange meanings to common words. Evan Shellshear, at Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre in Gothenburg, sent me an example, a study called Fast Robust Automated Brain Extraction. Shellshear said: “I stumbled across this article somehow [whilst] looking for […]