MoCA: Turn Your Mind to It

How to Use Your Mind

Mind/Body Problems? Turn to Beer

Beer’s rich and rigorous attempt at dismantling old and deeply entrenched prejudices in cognitive science through the painstaking analysis of an evolved agent is more than welcome—especially so after a decade or more of not-quite-delivered promises from the dynamical systems approach to cognition. We are broadly in sympathy with the perspective Beer espouses, but we want to invite the author to...

Memory Reconsolidation: Time to Change Your Mind

A new study shows that temporal expectations about threats are a key part of fear memories and that changing this temporal expectation is enough to trigger the updating and reconsolidation of a previously learned fear.

Microbes Manipulate Your Mind

Take Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite. When mice are infected by it, they suffer the grave misfortune of becoming attracted to cats. Once a cat inevitably consumes the doomed creature, the parasite can complete its life cycle inside its new host. Or consider Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus that can grow into the brain of an insect. The fungus can force an ant to climb a plant befor...

What's in your Mind?

Neuropsychologists have an advantage on us dry Cognitive Scientists: They always have impressive color slides of PET or MRI or fMRI images showing the exact location of whatever they wish to discuss — the soul or the locus of sinful thoughts or the center of consciousness. If one were to go by popular science articles on the brain one would have to conclude that we know where everything is loca...