Ed. note: This week, in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, we’re featuring a 5-part series about the neuroscience of love and romance. At the end, we’ll put the full series on our website. Enjoy! Does all this romantic mumbo-jumbo make you feel a little queasy? I have good news: a recent study showed that listening [...]
Tags: brain, dopamine, junk food, love, MRI, music
Posted February 11, 2011 by Karen Merzenich under Neuroscience, Research studies
It’s common wisdom that women become emotionally unhinged when it’s their “time of the month,” right? Supposedly, we get weepy, angry, and just generally difficult whenever our periods come along. Is it true? For some women, sure, at least on occasion. Others aren’t as affected. This emotional instability has long been associated with hormonal changes [...]
Tags: brain function, depression, health, menstruation, MRI, neurology, PMS, postpartum depression, scientific studies, women
Posted September 20, 2010 by Marghi Merzenich under Neuroscience, Research studies
Last week I started discussing the social implications as they relate issues of neuroimaging and gender. If you haven’t read that article, you can access it here for the background and introduction to this topic. Here’s another example of the neuroscience of gender at work: As of 2009, an estimated 360 public schools in the [...]
Tags: brain imaging, education, equality, gender, MRI
Posted May 27, 2010 by Marghi Merzenich under Neuroscience, Odds and Ends, Research studies
Lately, I’ve read about quite a few interesting brain imaging studies, on all sorts of topics. Collectively, these have sparked my curiosity about this question: how might brain imaging technology transform our culture far beyond its medical applications? While many of the possibilities are exciting, others make me nervous–especially those that threaten hard-won equalities by [...]
Tags: evidence, gender, MRI, neuroimaging, research, women's rights
Posted May 17, 2010 by Marghi Merzenich under Neuroscience, Odds and Ends, Research studies
As someone with a deep interest in music, I’ve often wondered about that age-old question: where does music come from? It’s become a cliché for musicians to wax philosophical about how their creative impulses come from “deep within” or that improvisation is a way of expressing their “true self”, but good luck getting anything more [...]
Tags: Charles Limb, creativity, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, improvisation, jazz, Johns Hopkins, medial prefrontal cortex, MRI, music
Posted March 1, 2010 by Cyrus Hedayati under Brain exercise, Neuroscience, Odds and Ends, Research studies
All week I’ve been posting a favorite brain-related TED video each day. This is the last TED talk I’ll post for now- I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed them and learned from watching them. We’ll be sure to check the videos for TED 2010, which just concluded, and post any interesting neuroscience-related ones we find. Since [...]
Tags: Helen Fisher, love, MRI, TED
Posted February 14, 2010 by Karen Merzenich under Neuroscience, Odds and Ends
Posit Science's corporate blog is the place where our employees share their thoughts about Posit Science and its products, brain fitness, breakthroughs in neuroscience, and any other topic they find interesting and relevant. 
