Conflicting results on whether brain stimulation helps or hinders memory may be explained by the electrodes’ precise location: whether they’re tickling white matter or gray matter.

Your brain might make new nerve cells well into old age.

Understanding how healthy brains change over time is important for researchers untangling the ways that conditions like depression, stress and memory loss affect older brains.

When it comes to studying neurogenesis in humans, “the devil is in the details,” says Jonas Frisén, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who was not involved in the new research. Small differences in methodology — such as the way brains are preserved or how neurons are counted — can have a big impact on the results, which could explain the conflicting findings. The new paper “is the most rigorous study yet,” he says.

Sluggish memories might be captured via RNA. The molecule, when taken from one sea slug and injected into another, appeared to transfer a rudimentary memory between the two, a new study suggests.

We may be biased, but we think the human brain is pretty special.

This myth is so prevalent that it is unquestioningly accepted as a pivotal plot point in movies, a motivational tactic for self-improvement, or justification for claims about ESP and other supposed untapped abilities of the human mind. A 2013 poll surveying over 2000 Americans found that 65 percent believed the 10 percent myth. A 2007 study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that even some doctors weren't immune to the fallacy. But the truth is that everyone uses 100 percent of their brain.

Decades later, the myth has persevered because of the attractive possibility it seems to present. It absolves us for not reaching our full potential, offers a persistent insecurity for self-help gurus to appeal to, and provides a pseudo-scientific explanation for the limits of human comprehension. 

Our eyes can distinguish between millions of colors. The trouble is, we’re not very good at recalling them. So while you might be an ace at picking out the odd-colored square in Kuku Kube, you probably can’t choose the right paint swatch at the hardware store to match your walls. 

“We have very precise perception of color in the brain, but when we have to pick that color out in the world," study author Jonathan Flombaum of John Hopkins University explained in a statement, “there's a voice that says, ‘It’s blue,’ and that affects what we end up thinking we saw."

We've all had experiences we'd prefer not to remember. That's especially true for people who have gone through a traumatic event such as childhood abuse, combat-related PTSD, or a bad accident. But there may be positive health applications for identifying, predicting, and retrieving negative emotions in the brain, according to two new studies. 

Researchers identified the different networks in the brain that all work together during a participant’s negative emotional experience, which they call a “brain signature.” Then, they used machine-learning algorithms to find global patterns of brain activity that best predicted the participants’ responses. “What we’re calling a 'brain signature' is basically a configuration—a brain pattern that is predictive of a state,” Chang tells mental_floss. He compares the process to the way that Netflix predicts who is watching a certain type of show based on the watcher’s choices in programming.

MEMORIES CAUSED—AND LOST—BY TRAUMA

You’ve always considered yourself a sound decision-maker. From that heavily researched car that you drove to work this morning to the carefully prepared meal you’ll cook up for dinner this evening, you put a lot of thought into every choice that you make—maybe too much thought. 

Imagine a future where you could transmit a unique feeling, a hard-to-translate thought process, or precise motor movements via a neural pattern from your brain to someone else’s brain, sharing what can’t otherwise be easily communicated. This is the goal of new research conducted at the University of Washington (UW).

“We wanted to show that this brain-to-brain interface can be used to do something highly interactive and collaborative

The function of the experiment is conceptually simple, Stocco says. Two people sit apart in different buildings. One, the respondent, is wearing a cap connected to electroencephalography machine (EEG) that records electrical brain activity. A magnetic coil is placed behind the head of the other participant, the inquirer. The coil delivers “transcranial magnetic stimulation.” The respondent is given an object to think of, much like in the game Twenty Questions. Then the inquirer chooses questions to send to the respondent via the Internet. The respondent answers the questions using only their brainwaves, by thinking the answer “yes” or “no.”

Don’t get too creeped out, but there are a whole lot of people walking around right now with a map of your face in their brains. But at least it’s a two-way street—you have their faces mapped in yours, too. That’s the conclusion of a recent report published in the journal Cortex. Social animals depend on being able to recognize one another. All monkeys might look the same to you, but you can be sure that they can tell each other apart. The same is true for humans. The ability to identify another person is a vital part of social interaction, which is an essential part of our lives. 

For that reason, our brains seem to devote a lot of real estate to facial recognition. Scientists believe that most of the work of facial perception happens in two brain sections: the occipital face area (OFA) and the fusiform face area (FFA). But it wasn’t clear how those regions managed recognition. 

When it comes to the human brain, scientists still have a lot left to learn. One function that remains mysterious? How we're able to interpret two-dimensional pictures—like a picture of a cat on a computer screen—into objects we recognize from real life. In order to learn more about this process, researchers from the University of Washington have found a way to use brain implants and advanced software to decode brain signals at nearly the speed of thought.

The electrodes in their brains were hooked up to a software that had been programmed to detect two specific brain signal properties: "event-related potentials" that occur in immediate response to an image and "broadband spectral changes" that linger after an image has already been seen. By digitizing brain signals at a rate of 1000 times per second, the software was able to pinpoint which combination of electrode locations and signals best matched the image the patients saw in front of them.

Babies may be able to see image details that are invisible or imperceptible to adults. According to a recent study [PDF] from Japanese scientists Jiale Yang, So Kanazawa, Masami K. Yamaguchi, and Isamu Motoyoshi, three- and four-month-old infants may view certain images differently because they lack perceptual constancy. That means they can see small image differences that are invisible to adults because of changes in lighting conditions.

In an attempt to understand and measure the brain’s synapses, whose shape and size have remained mysterious to scientists, researchers at the University of Texas, Austin and the Salk Institute worked together to determine that the brain’s memory capacity is much larger than previously understood. The results, published in the journal eLife, estimate that an individual human brain may store as much as a petabyte of information—perhaps 10 times more than previously estimated, and about the equivalent of the World Wide Web.

A study showed that people with generalized anxiety disorder unconsciously label harmless things as threats, which may serve to further their anxiety.

In overgeneralization, the brain lumps both safe and unsafe things together and labels them all unsafe. For this reason, the researchers also call this the “better safe than sorry” approach. Our brains naturally pay more attention to negative or threatening information in our environments. If anxious people perceive more threats in the world around them, it would make a lot of sense for them to be worried.

Scientists used to believe that memory was like a filing cabinet. You have an experience, and it gets its own little file in your brain. Then, later, you can go back and open the file, which is unchanged and where it should be. It’s a nice, tidy image—but it’s wrong. Your brain is much more complicated and sophisticated than that. It’s more like a super-high-powered computer, with dozens of tasks and applications running at once.

A 2011 study found that the Doorway Effect is the result of several of these brain programs running simultaneously. Researchers taught 55 college students to play a computer game in which they moved through a virtual building, collecting and carrying objects from room to room. Every so often as the participants traversed the space, a picture of an object popped up on the screen. If the object shown was the one they were carrying or the one they had just put down, the participants clicked “Yes.” Sometimes these pictures appeared after the participant had walked into a room; other times they appeared while the participant was still in the middle of a room. The researchers then built a real-world version of the environment and ran the experiment again, using a box to hide the objects people were carrying so they couldn’t double-check.

Scientists have been culturing brain cells in the lab for some time now. But previous projects have produced only flat sheets of cells and tissue, which can’t really come close to recreating the three-dimensional conditions inside our heads. The Stanford researchers were especially interested in the way brain cells in a developing fetus can join up together to create networks.