They call him “Dr. WAI,” short for “Where Am I.” A well-educated 29-year-old man without any history of disease or trauma, it took him four tries to produce a semi-accurate…

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.:…

Although post-traumatic stress disorder is an established diagnosis in psychology, and stressed combat veterans are a cliché in Hollywood, it wasn’t long ago when PTSD wasn’t…

One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry. At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine. For 40 minutes,…

I was up again at 4 a.m. the other night, one of five nocturnal ramblings in the early morning, the new me. No sleep. Picking my way in the dark, familiar territory of a home on Cape…

Lauren R. Weinstein is a cartoonist based in New Jersey. She is currently working on a graphic novel tentatively entitled How to Draw a Nose. Her previous books include Girl Stories…

Somewhere in the middle of the night in a Central African rainforest, a chimpanzee gives birth. Soon after, as the sun rises, mother and newborn sit there, dazed, amid a coffee klatch…

When we speak of brain cells we usually mean neurons: those gregarious, energetic darlings of cell biology that intertwine their many branches in complex webs and constantly crackle…

You’ve probably heard the myth that the average person uses only 10 percent of their brain. It’s a seductive lie because it suggests that we could be more than we are. Sci-fi movies…

Have you ever had the experience of being so absorbed by a painting or a piece of music,” writes Anjan Chatterjee in his 2013 book The Aesthetic Brain, “that you lose all sense…