You won’t have seen it on the podium, but the human brain’s mirror neuron system could have medaled at this year’s Olympic Games, or basically any sporting event with an audience.…

The brain is complex; in humans it consists of about 100 billion neurons, making on the order of 100 trillion connections. It is often compared with another complex system that has…

By the seventh month of my pregnancy, I sometimes felt a stroking motion on the inside of my abdomen, a repeated arc of movement traced by a tiny limb.My daughter Lucy weighed 6 pounds…

The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky…

Happiness, in one form or another, seems to be a common goal that most of us would like to attain. We often behave as though we might find a route to contentment—comfort, satiety,…

I have long been interested in human affect—the world of emotions and feelings—and have spent many years investigating it: why and how we emote, feel, use feelings to construct…

Following Oliver Sacks, Antonio Damasio may be the neuroscientist whose popular books have done the most to inform readers about the biological machinery in our heads, how it generates…

An amusing anecdote involving Darwin epitomizes the power of curiosity in creative people. When Darwin arrived at Cambridge in 1828, he became an avid collector of beetles. Once, after…

Early in my neurology residency, a 50-year-old woman insisted on being hospitalized for protection from the FBI spying on her via the TV set in her bedroom. The woman’s physical…

In one way, Jackson Pollock’s mathematics was ahead of its time. When the reclusive artist poured paint from cans onto vast canvases laid out across the floor of his barn in the…