This week I attended back-to-back conferences on learning and the brain. The first was held at my favorite art-place, the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. I got a few tips on how to space my study hours and what not to say about “learning styles.” You can see my giant story on it on [...]
We are not all the same when it comes to our reactions to stress, I rediscovered on Tuesday afternoon during a workshop sponsored by the International Brain Research Organization to mark Women’s History Month. For example, the idea that our bodies’ involuntary stress reactions serve us well in the case of acute stress (short-term) but [...]
On a recent rainy Sunday afternoon in Baltimore, I joined a couple dozen people participating in an experiment in neuroaesthetics, helping researchers try to take a reading on what art does to our brains. The exhibit/experiment “Beauty and the Brain: A Neural Approach to Aesthetics” at the Walters Art Museum is a collaboration between the [...]
We’ve come a long way in incorporating evidence-based methods into music therapy, and we’ve only just begun, said Concetta M. Tomaino, of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in the Bronx, New York, in her recent “Music and the Brain” lecture at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. When she started working as [...]
This year it’s the 15th anniversary of the worldwide event to celebrate the brain. To paraphrase my dentist (who asks me every visit, “How is everything in your mouth?”), how is everything in your brain? To learn more, and maybe understand more, check out an BAW event this week–there are hundreds listed on the Dana [...]
Twenty students from 14 schools across Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia braved the snow and ice to participate in the DC Regional Brain Bee on Wednesday. Before the competition, Bee judge Dr. Ben Walker of Georgetown University asked how many participants are contemplating a career in the sciences. All twenty competitors raised their [...]
Here are some of the things you can do during Brain Awareness Week, the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The video is from a BAW tour for school groups at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, DC, in 2009. The photos are from [...]
We are in final edits on a cute little video showing some of the fun stuff people do to celebrate Brain Awareness Week, which this year will be March 15–21. It’s my first foray into video-making since the early 1980s, and I am quite a bit rusty, so this will be an “unauthorized” version, but [...]
The brain of Henry Molaison, the most famous amnesic and perhaps the most-studied neurological patient in history, will go under the knife starting Wednesday morning. Mr. Molaison, who died in December 2008, donated his brain to science; as part of the Brain Observatory Project, his contribution will help thousands of researchers worldwide. Brain Project scientists [...]
Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which people’s senses seem to be crossed. Some people with the condition can feel tastes or see sounds; others taste voices (think of the opposite of anesthesia, literally “no senses”). Neurologist Richard Cytowic has studied such people for more than three decades, starting with a man in the rare latter [...]
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Posted 03 November 2009
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November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org