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Amygdala
Rituals serve psychological functions that go far beyond mere habit or tradition.
Life's "in-between" stages pack unique cognitive benefits — if you know how to tap into them.
Curiosity is often considered a personality quirk. Neuroscience paints a different picture.
Recent research sheds light on how the brain overgeneralizes fear, causing people to be afraid of harmless situations.
You really can get by with a little help from your friends — if you also look beyond your personal to-do list.
For better teamwork, take a lesson from research into soccer fans who put aside their tribalism.
The amygdala can hijack your brain's response if it recognizes past trauma in a current situation. To regain control, simply press pause.
Medical psychologist Catherine Monk explains how prenatal mental care benefits both mothers and babies.
Boys are four times as likely as girls to develop autism. Girls are nearly twice as likely to experience depression. The immune system may be a player in these and other brain-health disparities.
"Human connection is as threatened by unhealthy peace as it is by unhealthy conflict." —Priya Parker
Emotion dysregulation has been linked to unhealthy risk-taking, relationship challenges, and negative physical health outcomes.
The discovery has enormous implications for the development of novel anti-anxiety medications.
Risk-taking isn't inherently bad: It tends to build self-confidence when things work out, and resilience when they don’t.
Million Stories
Your brain may notice fearful faces, even if you don't consciously realize it.
Some experiences continue to pay dividends time and time again.
Million Stories
Your breathing rhythm influences a wide range of behaviors, cognition, and emotion.
Over time, different structures in the brain come to play unique roles in the storage and retrieval of long-term memories.
Fear creates distraction, and that can be a positive experience.
This opens the door to manipulating networks of specific neurons.
The findings of a recent study may help explain why some people are quicker to forget fearful memories.
For many people, a challenge to their worldview feels like an attack on their personal identity.
Patients with amygdala damage rejected the widely accepted answer to the infamous "trolley problem," saying that it "hurts too much."
A deep learning AI running on a supercomputer was able to link patterns of brain connectivity to political ideology.
An experiment in rats suggests that gene editing may be a treatment for anxiety and alcoholism in adults who were exposed to binge-drinking in their adolescence.
Revolutionary techniques for understanding brain functions in animals could soon help us understand how emotions guide our lives.
Helplessness isn't learned — it's an instinctual response that can be overcome.
“At that time, it was just a wild idea, [...] that instead of just a loss of consciousness, anesthetics may do something to the brain that actually turns pain off.”