Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a safe and non-invasive method of temporarily altering the activity of neurons by passing weak currents through electrodes on the scalp

Excitation of the right hemisphere and inhibition of the left made the participants three times more likely to figure out the correct answer within 6 minutes compared with those who received the sham treatment.

right ATL is associated with insight and novel meaning. It also backs up previous findings that the left ATL is involved in processing routine strategies and the maintenance of existing hypotheses

Researchers examined data from a nationally representative sample of 6,483 adolescents, aged 13 to 18, and found that only 36.2% of those with any mental disorder received treatment.

one in five teens with anxiety, eating or substance abuse disorders received treatment. In addition, Hispanic and black adolescents were less likely than whites to receive treatment for mood and anxiety disorders, even when the disorders caused severe impairment, the researchers noted.

What the battle over DSM-5 should make clear to all of us—professional and layman alike—is that psychiatric diagnosis will probably always be laden with uncertainty, that the labels doctors give us for our suffering will forever be at least as much the product of negotiations around a conference table as investigations at a lab bench

how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.

The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.

female rats have about 30 to 50 percent more glial cells in the amygdala region of the temporal lobe of the brain than their male litter mates

females had lower amounts of endocannabinoids, which have been dubbed the brain's own marijuana because they activate cannabinoid receptors that are also stimulated by THC

female rats also played 30 to 40 percent less than male rats

Neuromarketing’s raison d’être derives from the fact that the brain expends only 2 percent of its energy on conscious activity, with the rest devoted largely to unconscious processing.

Add all those electrical patterns together, he says, and “you find it represents the whispers of the brain.”

Few other clear-cut differences between boys' and girls' neural structures, brain activity, or neurochemistry have thus far emerged, even for something as obviously different as self-regulation.

Our actual ability differences are quite small. Although psychologists can measure statistically significant distinctions between large groups of men and women or boys and girls, there is much more overlap in the academic and even social-emotional abilities of the genders than there are differences (Hyde, 2005). To put it another way, the range of performance within each gender is wider than the difference between the average boy and girl.

The brain scans of the most deceptive players showed "differential activation in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left Brodmann area 10" at the time of their deception, and strategic types showed a "significant correlation between activation in the right temporoparietal junction and expected payoff" that the other types did not show.

he brain scans of the most deceptive players showed "differential activation in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left Brodmann area 10" at the time of their deception, and strategic types showed a "significant correlation between activation in the right temporoparietal junction and expected payoff" that the other types did not show.

Epigenetics is defined as the study of heritable changes in gene activity that are not due to changes in DNA sequence. Instead, they may be caused by “silencing” a gene, for example, rather than mutating it.

These changes remodel the architecture of the chromosomes, opening up a particular gene to the machinery that synthesizes protein, or closing it down, so that the gene is switched off.

the life experiences of grandparents and even great-grandparents alter their eggs and sperm so indelibly that the change is passed on to their children, grandchildren, and beyond. It’s called transgenerational epigenetic inheritance

the phenomenon in which something in the environment alters the health not only of the individual exposed to it, but also of that individual’s descendants.

Other labs, too, are finding that experiences—everything from a lab animal being exposed to a toxic chemical to a person smoking, being malnourished in childhood, or overeating—leaves an imprint on eggs or sperm, an imprint so tenacious that it affects not only those individuals’ children but their grandchildren as well.