Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

Brainism: Understanding Our Recent Obsession With Stress and the Mind

April 24, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
brainism-brain

One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble With Stress as an Idea By Dana Becker (Oxford University Press) Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind By Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached (Princeton University Press) “I never used to discuss neuroscience on the bus,” wrote the psychologist Vaughan Bell recently in The Guardian, “but it’s happened twice in the last month.” People these days love to talk about brains. In everyday conversation and mainstream media reports, the organ and its processes are casually invoked (“my synapses are firing”) where ... Read More

More like this: Health, May-June 2013
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It’s Brain Week in France

March 6, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
France Brain Week

I don't have the data on this, but I'm guessing that most vacationers headed to La Belle, France are motivated by things like wine, 19th century art and those adorable little brightly colored cookies. If, however, the thought of chasing down French waiters or tramping through yet another famous cemetery fills you with dizzying ennui, here's another reason to see France: next week is Brain Week. From March 11 through 17, the National Center for Scientific Research and the French Society for Neuroscience will be hosting 300 conferences, workshops, film screenings and even theatrical pieces in ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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The Neurobiology of Fear

September 14, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Fear, like fire, is our friend when it isn’t raging out of control. Awareness of a potential threat activates the famous fight-or-flight impulse, facilitating a quick response. Once we realize the fright was actually a false alarm—that wasn’t a burglar you heard downstairs, just the cat—we rapidly return to a state of repose. But too often, people suffering from anxiety disorders fail to respond to the all-clear signal. This leaves them in an ongoing state of heightened tension, which—if it lasts long enough, or gets triggered often enough—can take a severe physical and mental ... Read More

More like this: Health, September-October 2012, Today in Mice
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Was Lou Gehrig’s ALS Caused by Tap Water?

January 5, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Rudyard Kipling called it “Hell’s Half Acre,” a geothermal wonderland where people could fall through the Earth’s thin crust or be poached by steamy hot springs and geysers. Most visitors to Yellowstone National Park’s Midway Geyser Basin stroll the wooden boardwalks, but a few hike a short, steep side trail that reveals a bird’s-eye view of the entire valley, including Grand Prismatic Spring, which can be fully appreciated only from above. Mustard-yellow and vibrant-orange mats spread like tentacles from the turquoise pool. “Not even the most talented artist could imagine ... Read More

More like this: Health, January-February 2012, Magazine Feature Story
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A Light Bulb Moment in the Brain

September 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

In a clear Plexiglas laboratory cage, a mouse sleeps. A thin fiber optic cable projects upward from the top of its head and out through the cage’s lid. The cable lights with a pulse of blue light. The mouse continues to sleep; the light continues to pulse. After a few more pulses, the mouse wakes up. It rubs its face, stretches its legs and runs over to its food cup and begins to eat voraciously, as though it were starving. It keeps eating as the blue light pulses. The optical fiber that carries the blue light goes directly into the mouse’s brain. It targets a specific group of brain ... Read More

More like this: Science
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I Foresee an Uproar Over an ESP Study

January 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

One evening more than a decade ago, I attended a talk by Daryl Bem, a well-known psychologist, at Reed College in Portland, Ore. Bem claimed that humans might be capable of precognition, or the ability to predict the future. As a newly minted Reed psychology graduate, Bem inspired me to write a computer program to test my own precognitive abilities. I happened to tell my boss and mentor at Reed, Allen Neuringer, about my little self-experiment. Allen, a wonderful person and adviser, and a behaviorist interested in hard facts, looked at me, paused for a moment, said "ESP doesn't exist," and ... Read More

More like this: Science, Science & Environment
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Shedding Light on Ice Hockey Blackouts

September 1, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

In the first period of Game 3 of the National Hockey League's Western Conference Finals, the Chicago Blackhawks' leading scorer, Martin Havlat, was knocked unconscious by a vicious body-check that sent him sprawling to the ice; his eyes were closed as teammates and medical personnel closed in around him. Two days later, he skated back out onto the ice for Game 4. Some folks would say, "that's just hockey," and let's face it, most of those folks live in Canada, where the sport is akin to a religion, despite being the main cause of sports-related traumatic brain injury. But a recent study ... Read More

More like this: Health, September-October 2009, The Cocktail Napkin
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Brain’s Indiana Joneses Search for Empathy

August 4, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

In 1759, long before he wrote The Wealth of Nations, Scottish philosopher Adam Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he outlined the ways in which one person feels what he called "sympathy" for another's suffering. In his oft-quoted introduction, he wrote, "By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether ... Read More

More like this: Science, Science & Environment
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Experts Live and Die With Mental Shortcuts

June 30, 2009 • By • 1 Comment

Gripping the controls of a $50 million, air-to-air combat simulator on a U.S. Air Force base back in 1992 gave cognitive neuroscientist Itiel Dror, then a Harvard graduate student on a summer internship, a rare feel for the fighter pilot's world. It was a wild ride, but not the source of Dror's insights into some of the unique challenges facing those pilots. Those were rooted in his expertise: a deep understanding of the underlying thought processes that affect human performance, learning, judgment and decision-making. Dror's challenge was to improve pilot recognition of aircraft silhouettes ... Read More

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