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Have a friend remove an object from a room you know well--say, a napkin holder from your kitchen--and then see if you can guess what he's taken away. Even if you don't know the answer, your eyes will unconsciously fixate on the stretch of countertop next to the toaster where the holder usually sits. Remembering what goes where in your kitchen is called relational memory, and now scientists have shown that your unknowing stare may be a sign that your brain remembers even when you don't.

Scientists may have discovered a way to glean information about stored memories by tracking patterns of eye movements, even when an individual is unable (or perhaps even unwilling) to report what they remember.

Neuroscientists explore the mind's sexual side and discover that desire is not quite what we thought it was.

For anyone who's ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone. In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they'd lost.

"When biologist Anthony Cashmore claims that the concept of free will is an illusion, he's not breaking any new ground. At least as far back as the ancient Greeks, people have wondered how humans seem to have the ability to make their own personal decisions in a manner lacking any causal component other than their desire to "will" something. But Cashmore, Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, says that many biologists today still cling to the idea of free will, and reject the idea that we are simply conscious machines, completely controlled by a combination of our chemistry and external environmental forces."

"The human brain is a big believer in equality -- and a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has become the first to gather the images to prove it."

That's how it is with the early flickers of paranoia, confusion, hypersensitivity and hallucination in people who develop schizophrenia. They often emerge exactly when adolescence is throwing the body and brain for a loop, and years before the disease manifests itself fully.

Researchers have found a pharmaceutical way to clear some of the cognitive fog that results from a sleepless night. In a new study using lab mice, researchers corrected the memory problems in sleep-deprived mice through a drug that suppressed levels of a certain enzyme in a brain region called the hippocampus.

How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life.