Scientific American Mind & Brain

Brain Injury Rate 7 Times Greater among U.S. Prisoners
February 4, 2012, 1:00 pm
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A car accident, a rough tackle, an unexpected tumble. The number of ways to bang up the brain are almost as numerous as the people who sustain these injuries. And only recently has it become clear just how damaging a seemingly minor knock can be. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is no longer just a condition acknowledged in military personnel or football players and other professional athletes. Each year some 1.7 million civilians will suffer an injury that disrupts the function of their brains, qualifying it as a TBI.
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Lies We Tell Ourselves (preview)
February 4, 2012, 1:00 pm
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In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970 rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar , a skeptical Judas Iscariot questions with faux innocence (“Don’t you get me wrong/I only want to know”) the messiah’s deific nature: “Jesus Christ Superstar/Do you think you’re what they say you are?”
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Social Clicks: Sounds Associated with African Languages Are Common in English
February 3, 2012, 1:00 pm
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Some Africans click, but English speakers don’t. That’s been the conventional wisdom about click sounds, which serve as regular consonants in Zulu and Xhosa and a few other African languages but which were presumed to just be used in English for encouraging a horse, imitating a kiss, or expressing emotions such as disapproval or amazement. But researchers have recently found that clicks are far more prevalent in the world’s lingua franca than had been thought.
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MIND Reviews: The Righteous Mind
February 3, 2012, 1:00 pm
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The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion [More]
What a Yawn Says about Your Relationship
January 31, 2012, 7:00 pm
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You can tell a lot about a person from their body. And I don’t just mean how many hours they spend at the gym, or how easy it is for them to sweet-talk their way out of speeding tickets. For the past several decades researchers have been studying the ways in which the body reveals properties of the mind. An important subset of this work has taken this idea a step further: do the ways our bodies relate to one another tell us about the ways in which our minds relate to one another? Consider behavioral mimicry. Many studies have found that we quite readily mimic the nonverbal behavior of those with whom we interact. Furthermore, the degree to which we mimic others is predicted by both our personality traits as well as our relationship to those around us. In short , the more empathetic we are, the more we mimic, and the more we like the people we’re interacting with, the more we mimic. The relationship between our bodies reveals something about the relationship between our minds.
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Scientists Manipulate and Erase Memories (preview)
January 26, 2012, 1:00 pm
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Joël Coutu knelt on the cold cement floor of the pet supply store he managed in Montreal, his wrists bound behind him with telephone wire. He could feel the barrel of a pistol pressed against the back of his neck. “You’re lying!” the gunman screamed. “And I am going to blow your head off.”
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U.S. Science Degrees Are Up
January 25, 2012, 1:00 pm
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The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance
January 24, 2012, 4:40 pm
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Do you enjoy having time to yourself, but always feel a little guilty about it? Then Susan Cain’s “ Quiet : The Power of Introverts ” is for you. It’s part book, part manifesto. We live in a nation that values its extroverts – the outgoing, the lovers of crowds – but not the quiet types who change the world. She recently answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook .
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Stuttering Reflects Irregularities in Brain Setup
January 23, 2012, 1:00 pm
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Put on a pair of headphones and turn up the volume so that you can’t even hear yourself speak. For those who stutter, this is when the magic happens. Without the ability to hear their own voice, people with this speech impediment no longer stumble over their words--as was recently portrayed in the movie The King’s Speech . This simple trick works because of the unusual way the brain of people who stutter is organized--a neural setup that affects other actions besides speech, according to a new study.
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Forgetting Actually Strengthens Memory--a Special Report (preview)
January 18, 2012, 1:00 pm
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Most people picture human memory as something resembling a secure metal vault into which we cram our valuable--and not so valuable--thoughts for safekeeping. The people with the biggest vaults, then, can keep the most stuff. They know the most and make the fewest mistakes. [More]