A surgeon wielding a micro-scalpel cuts through the head capsule of her subject, the nocturnal sweat bee Megalopta genalis, in a lab at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute…

Tony Ro’s research on the brain’s mixing of sound and touch began, appropriately enough, at a mixer. It was the spring of 2000 in Houston, Texas, where he had recently launched…

Home is more than a place on a map. It evokes a particular set of feelings, and a sense of safety and belonging. Location, memories, and emotions are intertwined within those walls.…

In this month’s Nautilus story, “Safecracking the Brain,” I dug into the work of two research groups that are stealing tips from cryptology to better understand how our brains…

It’s hard to imagine an encryption machine more sophisticated than the human brain. This three-pound blob of tissue holds an estimated 86 billion neurons, cells that rapidly fire…

In his most recent book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has revisited his 1991 observation that consciousness arises out of a selection…

Ever since Robert Burton began studying neurology in the 1960s, he has been puzzled by a basic cognitive problem: What does it mean to be convinced? What’s happening in our brain…

1. Unshaven and one bit shortTo death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin’s binary list of life’s certainties, add the expectation that this six-note sequence:  Will continue with this:…

In “Metaphors Are Us,” biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky made a good case for why symbolic thinking may be the key feature separating humans from our nearest animal relatives.…

If you dropped a dozen human toddlers on a beautiful Polynesian island with shelter and enough to eat, but no computers, no cell phones, and no metal tools, would they grow up to be…