The bottle of wine you and your partner shared last night didn't kill a single neuron in your head and, contrary to what you've been told, you are always using […]

What makes some brains smarter than others? Are intelligent people better at storing and retrieving memories? Or perhaps their neurons have more connections allowing them to creatively combine dissimilar ideas?

Republican senate candidate Sharron Angle is a staunch defender of traditional marriage. However, one of Angle's campaign donors one-upped her in the tradition department. While leafing through FEC reports this […]

About 20% of journal articles published in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities are open-access, meaning that only about 1 out of every 5 articles are immediately or eventually […]

Controlling other people’s dreams may be science fiction, but there are ways to control our own dreams, Harris says.

For patients with narcolepsy, a loud noise or a strong emotion can trigger the body to fall asleep instantly.

During REM sleep, the body is paralyzed so that the sleeper does not act out his dreams, but when this phenomenon malfunctions, bizarre sleep disorders like sleep paralysis and REM […]

Harris practices Imagery Rehearsal Therapy, which teaches patients to take control of nightmares by rehearsing them during the day and changing them into positive scenarios. 90% of Harris’s patients report […]

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed that dreams were windows into the unconscious, but many scientists now believe they may have no deeper meaning.

In the pre-modern world, circadian rhythms were synched with the rising and setting of the sun, but modern life requires many to adjust their internal clocks to accommodate alternative sleeping […]

For many with insomnia, their minds are like stereos at maximum volume with no off switch.

Sleep is hardly a period of inactivity for the brain. During a normal night’s sleep, the brain cycles through various stages including REM sleep, during which the brain is just […]

A conversation with the sleep psychologist.

Stern’s research uncovered a neural network in the brain that accounts for some people’s ability to function well despite a lack of sleep.

The iconic abnormal psych case of Phineas Gage provided scientists with the first hints that different functions like decision-making and language acquisition were grouped into localized areas within the brain.

I became addicted to The Wire. I know, I 'm late to the party. Very late, since the final episode aired over two years ago. But over the last few […]

Today is the last day of the Month of Thinking Dangerously here at Big Think, and in that spirit, we are presenting some more dangerous ideas from bioethicist Jacob Appel. […]

"More doctors are turning to repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) of their patient's brains, but fears of possible seizures may be limiting its growth as a therapeutic tool."

"The Iraqi population is suddenly mourning the departure of American troops, the once-hated occupiers, as fears of a civil war grow." Spiegel reports on what is next for Iraq and its future.

"As the globe logs an unusually hot summer, Canada is boosting its presence in the warming and increasingly accessible Arctic." The Wall Street Journal on emerging geopolitics.