And in a world where many high-stakes issues fundamentally boil down to science, this is clearly a problem. 

Naturally, the solution to the problem lies in good schooling — emptying minds of their youthful hunches and intuitions about how the world works, and repopulating them with sound scientific principles that have been repeatedly tested and verified. Wipe out the old operating system, and install the new

Although science as a field discards theories that are wrong or lacking, Shtulman and Valcarcel’s work suggests that individuals —even scientifically literate ones — tend to hang on to their early, unschooled, and often wrong theories about the natural world.

Most people have so-called flashbulb memories of where they were and what they were doing when something momentous happened: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, say, or the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. (Unfortunately, staggeringly terrible news seems to come out of the blue more often than staggeringly good news.) But as clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

Nader, now a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, says his memory of the World Trade Center attack has played a few tricks on him. He recalled seeing television footage on September 11 of the first plane hitting the north tower of the World Trade Center. But he was surprised to learn that such footage aired for the first time the following day.

ut of 27 emotions in total, the researchers found that sadness was the longest-lasting emotion; shame, surprise, fear, disgust, boredom, being touched, irritation and relief, however, were the shortest-lasting emotions.

The team was surprised to find that boredom was one of the shortest emotions; typically time seems to pass slowly when we are bored. However, they say their results show that an episode of boredom does not actually last very long.

Erasing the anguish associated with a breakup or a traumatic event may soon no longer be confined to the realm of science fiction, or the central idea of the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” following an apparent breakthrough by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Neuroscientists at MIT have honed in on the pathway of brain cells that appear to control the way our memories become linked to emotions — and have been able to “reverse” the emotion in mice linked to a specific memory, turning bad memories into good and vice versa

"Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder," said Susumu Tonegawa, an MIT neuroscientist and a lead author of the study. "It's a creative process."

Emotion, in its most general definition, is a neural impulse that moves an organism to action, prompting automatic reactive behavior that has been adapted through evolution as a survival mechanism to meet a survival need.

ased on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain

ALL OF US, even postmodern philosophers, are naive realists at heart. We assume that the external world maps perfectly onto our internal view of it—an expectation that is reinforced by daily experience.

That there should be a match between perception and reality is not surprising, because evolution ruthlessly eliminates the unfit.

As psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered over the past several decades, our consciousness provides a stable interface to a dizzyingly rich sensory world. Underneath this interface lurk two visio

Ghosts exist only in the mind, and scientists know just where to find them, an EPFL study suggests

In their experiment, Blanke’s team interfered with the sensorimotor input of participants in such a way that their brains no longer identified such signals as belonging to their own body, but instead interpreted them as th

ose of someone else.