Joyful, mocking and "ticklish" laughter activates different connections in the brain, a study has shown. Scientists investigated the "laughter perc...
In his willingness to admit his errors when he does make them lies perhaps the greatest secret to Holmes's continued success.
Brain scans may be able to detect whether or not a person is racist, a scientific study has reported. The research, which monitored the human brai...
Curiosity exposes you to novelty, and curious people live longer and healthier lives, research shows. And one way of stimulating curiosity is to vacation with a purpose.
The late writer Christopher Hitchens wrote that when you come to New York, you go to bed an hour later and wake up an hour earlier, and I can confirm this anecdotally myself. Noradrenaline is the key 'wake-up' drug of the brain and it may be that the shear repeated novelty and stimulus of this great city is chemically flooding my brain with this brain-protecting substance.
My friend remarked on how he'd had the top medical care and had taken almost 10,000 pills in the eight years between the doctor's diagnosis and its reversal. Yet that time was still filled with such mental and physical lows that he frequently felt suicidal.
Dr. Eben Alexander - who has worked at some of the most prestigious US medical institutions - has spoken of the need for a different "picture of reality" after he nearly died during a seven-day coma. His book "Proof of Heaven" has just been published.
The brains in this image both belong to three-year-old children, yet the difference in size is dramatic. What's even more dramatic is that the var...
Chocolate may make the heart grow fonder, but does it make the brain grow larger? This week a New England Journal of Medicine article investigated whether a correlation existed between a countries per capita chocolate consumption (mostly measured through Lindt® dark chocolate consumption) and their cumulative amount of Nobel Prize winners.
Brain and genetic disorders are no-one's fault:no-one, certainly not the family, is to blame. The concept of the guilt-ridden mother has been relegated to history books and horror movies... Or so the mental health establishment tells us.
As if criminals being able to extract sensitive information from our computers and smartphones wasn’t enough of a worry, now scientists have shown t...
Emotions may determine why some people are more likely to suffer chronic pain than others, a study has found. The emotional state of the brain can ...
Although non-smokers may find it hard to believe, cigarettes are intensely pleasurable to those addicted to nicotine. A puff on a cigarette reliev...
A dramatic rise in the use of compulsory admissions over the last two decades does not mean that psychiatric disorders have in their nature got worse, but that the prospects for those who have them seem more bleak. This is because a progressively starved, more disorganised NHS is less effectively caring.
Life is full of temptations and we need lots of self-control to live a happy life - not having too many helpings of dessert or too many drinks on a w...
What do women want? Some might say it's a question that has perplexed men for millennia! But in the box office hit of the same name, Mel Gibson's sc...
For the first time scientists have managed to turn skin cells into fully functional brain cells. It may sound Frankenstein-like to some, but far fr...
If I've learnt anything, it's that Enya should come with a health warning (then again, I think I knew that instinctively already).
It probably takes a lot to phase comedian Jimmy Carr. But a moulded plastic mask of Einstein's head managed to do that on an episode of QI. Why? Bec...
American scientists have come a step closer to discovering a way of ‘curing’ paralysed limbs by creating technology that delivers direct electroni...
Dr Albert Einstein's brain is going on display for the first time in the UK alongside that of an infamous murderer. Following his death at the age ...
Scientists may soon be able to listen to paralysed or brain-damaged patients who cannot speak, thanks to a form of electronic telepathy. In a study...
If you rely on a daily fix of caffeine to kickstart your brain each morning, you might be interested to know that decaffeinated coffee could help pres...
Scientists have discovered a way of converting skin cells directly into neural precursor cells - the cells that develop into the three main components...
When it comes to art, only the real deal will do, according to a study into fake paintings. Oxford University academics found that t...
