For decades, many people quietly accepted a bleak idea: that the brain peaks in youth and then slides steadily downhill, like an old radio losing its signal. Now, a wave of research is taking a hammer to that myth, replacing it with something far more hopeful and far more interesting. Scientists are finding that ...
You probably remember where you were on one life-changing day, yet routinely forget why you walked into the kitchen. That gap between what sticks and what slips away has fascinated scientists for more than a century, and in the last few decades brain research has finally started to crack the code. Memory is not ...
Some scientific questions feel big; others feel almost indecent to ask out loud. Why does consciousness exist at all – why is there a felt, inner movie rather than just blind electrical activity in a lump of tissue? For more than a century, neuroscience has mapped brain regions, charted neurons, and built ever-faster scanners, ...
Consciousness is the one thing each of us is absolutely certain of experiencing, yet it stubbornly refuses to fit into the usual boxes of biology. Hearts pump, livers filter, neurons fire – but the feeling of being you seems to float above all that, like a ghost hitching a ride in a machine. For ...
For most of the twentieth century, doctors told a sobering story about the brain: you are born with a fixed number of neurons, you steadily lose them, and that’s that. The message landed especially hard on older adults, who were led to believe that forgetfulness and mental slowdown were simply an unavoidable slide. Over ...
For most of the twentieth century, medical textbooks treated the aging brain like a one-way street: born with a fixed number of neurons, slowly losing them as the years tick by. That story was simple, a little fatalistic, and, as it turns out, deeply incomplete. Over the past few decades, scientists have been quietly ...
Every so often, someone walks into a room, glances at a crowded whiteboard, and later recites it back line for line as if reading from a hidden screenshot in their mind. Stories like these fuel the myth of photographic memory, a supposedly perfect mental camera that never forgets. But as neuroscientists keep probing this ...
The human brain is often compared to a computer, but that metaphor falls apart the deeper you go, a bit like trying to describe a colossal squid as “just a big fish.” Hidden in the darkness of our skulls is a biological deep sea: billions of neurons flickering like bioluminescent creatures, forming patterns we ...
Stand in front of a mirror, stare at your own eyes for long enough, and your face may seem to warp, blur, or even become strangely unfamiliar. That eerie feeling is not a glitch in the glass; it is your brain quietly editing reality on the fly. From optical illusions that break the internet ...
Somewhere behind your eyes, something is having a first-person experience of the world, and we still don’t really know how. Neuroscientists can now watch brain cells fire in real time, map networks with staggering detail, and even nudge brain activity with magnetic pulses – yet the raw feeling of being you remains stubbornly mysterious. ...
Maria Faith Saligumba
