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"MID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like "lavender," "cinnamon" and "soap," for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for "perfume" and "coffee," their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean "chair" and "key," this region remained dark. The way the brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet vo

"Can men and women ever compete fairly in a sport like running? Yes, but it requires a little bit of maths know-how."

Serco Group - the largest company you've never heard of

Part 1 of a 4-part series examining what happens when science is used for marketing (using brain-training software as the central example). Almost all of the programs that tout their ability to train your brain are limited in scope. Most train your ability to perform simple cognitive tasks by having you perform them repeatedly, often adapting the difficulty of the task over time to keep it challenging. Some determine which tasks you perform well and which need improvement and adjust the tasks based on your ongoing performance. The simplest ones, though, simply track how much you improve and inform you that such improvements have made increased the fitness of your brain. Such task-specific training effects can be really useful-if you want to enhance your ability to do Sudoku, by all means practice doing Sudoku. But what pitches for those programs regularly imply is that playing their videogame or using their training will enhance your ability to do other tasks that weren't specifically trained. For example, this advertisement for Nintendo's Brain Age implies that by using their game, you will be better able to remember your friend's name when you meet him on the street. The idea that playing games can improve your brain is pervasive, and it taps what Chris Chabris and I have called the "illusion of potential." A common myth of the mind is that we have vast pools of untapped mental resources that can be released with relatively minimal effort. This common intuitive belief underlies the pervasive myth that we only use 10% of our brains, that listening to Mozart can increase our IQ [pdf], and even the belief that some people have "discovered" psychic abilities. We devote the last main chapter of The Invisible Gorilla to this belief and its ramifications, and we recently wrote a column for the NY Times discussing how popular self-help books like The Secret and The Power capitalize on this mistaken belief. The marketing for some brain training programs

"Citing cases dating back as far as 1928, a judge has ruled that a young girl accused of running down an elderly woman while racing a bicycle with training wheels on a Manhattan sidewalk two years ago can be sued for negligence. "

"The economic crisis in Ireland has shown that "too big to fail" can quickly turn into "too big to save" as the Irish government tried to shore up faltering private banks, with catastrophic results for the entire economy. In a recent Op-Ed article, Thomas Hoenig, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, wrote that despite financial reform legislation, the biggest banks still control our economy and pose a serious threat. After the last round of bailouts, the five largest financial institutions are 20 percent larger now than they were in 2008. If large American banks run into trouble, would they ever be allowed to go bankrupt? If not, what can be done if they start to fail? As global financial institutions grow in size, how perilous is this condition for the U.S.? "

"There's little doubt that the placebo effect's real, but it has always been argued that a person feels better because they think the pill is the real deal. But what if it works even when you know it's a fake? According to Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues at least one condition can be calmed by placebo, even when everyone knows it's just an inert pill. This raises a thorny question: should we start offering sugar pills for ailments without a treatment? In the latest study, Kaptchuk tested the effect of placebo versus no treatment in 80 people with irritable bowel syndrome. Twice a day, 37 people swallowed an inert pill could not be absorbed by the body. The researchers told participants that it could improve symptoms through the placebo effect. While 35 per cent of the patients who had not received any treatment reported an improvement, 59 per cent of the placebo group felt better. "The placebo was almost twice as effective as the control," says Kaptchuk. "That would be a great result if it was seen in a normal clinical trial of a drug." Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, UK, thinks that "the size of the benefit is too small to be clinically relevant". Kaptchuk agrees and wants to run some larger trials to get a better picture of the effect. If a dummy pill can improve IBS, shouldn't we be exploring its effect on other ailments? "It wouldn't work on a tumour or kill microbes, but it's likely to affect illnesses where self-appraisal is important, such as depression" says Kaptchuk. A 2008 study found that around a third of physicians had prescribed a dummy pill to unwitting patients. "Now we have shown that there are ethical ways of harnessing the placebo effect," says Kaptchuk. Surely now you can make a case for using a placebo when there are no other treatment options? Kaptchuk feels there is still an ethical dilemma here. "I'm against giving patients something unless it's been

"Born without his fibulas, the long bones that span from the knees to the ankles, Pistorius relies on carbon-fiber prosthetic limbs to propel him around the track in times comparable to some of the world's top runners. And therein remains the question that has been the crux of a continuing debate: do those high-tech legs give him an unfair advantage? "

"And this is how the Civil War comes to life for a roomful of fourth-graders in Northern Virginia, 150 years after the nation's deadliest armed conflict began. Agner's reenactment of the landmark naval Battle of Hampton Roads - a tactile lesson the vet­eran teacher dreamed up this year - drew her Fairfax County class into a chapter of American history that has long provoked education debate. The war's sesquicentennial, starting Tuesday with the anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, provides a "teachable moment" for schools everywhere. But how and when students learn about slavery and secession, blue and gray, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, Bull Run (or Manassas) and Appomattox varies enormously from state to state, school to school and even teacher to teacher. This year, Virginia learned anew the sensitivity of Civil War education when the state Board of Education withdrew approval of a fourth-grade textbook - "Our Virginia: Past and Present" - that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the South. Most historians reject that claim. Last year, the Texas State Board of Education voted to require eighth-graders to study the inaugural address of Confederate President Jefferson Davis alongside President Abraham Lincoln's first and second inaugurals and his Gettysburg Address. That was one of many controversial revisions to Texas standards. Jeremy A. Stern, a historian who reviewed state academic standards this year for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said differences in the timing and scope of Civil War education across the United States are dramatic. Often, he said, the war is not taught systematically until middle school. "

"Benno M. Nigg has become a leading researcher on orthotics - those shoe inserts that many athletes use to try to prevent injuries. And what he has found is not very reassuring. For more than 30 years Dr. Nigg, a professor of biomechanics and co-director of the Human Performance Lab at the University of Calgary in Alberta, has asked how orthotics affect motion, stress on joints and muscle activity. Do they help or harm athletes who use them? And is the huge orthotics industry - from customized shoe inserts costing hundreds of dollars to over-the-counter ones sold at every drugstore - based on science or on wishful thinking? "