Cognitive Science : From Neuroscience to Education

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.