We encounter, in each nanosecond of our lives, billions of sensations, some of which we are aware and many, many more of which we are not.

The vast majority of these sensations are ignored by our conscious mind, while those that we recognize and name become perceptions—categorized sensations of which we are consciously aware

Though neither person may be aware of it, the skin and bones of both their bodies receive thousands of simultaneous touches—the smooth warmth of the coffee mug beneath the fingers, the hard wood of the chair on the sit bones, the soft rubber of the mat under their feet, and the cool metal of the table under their wrists.

YOU'RE not imagining the pain. But your brain might be behind it, nonetheless. For the first time, it is possible to distinguish between brain activity associated with pain from a physical cause, such as an injury, and that associated with pain linked to your state of mind.

A fifth of the world's population is thought to experience some kind of chronic pain – that which has lasted longer than three months. If the pain has no clear cause, people can find themselves fobbed off by doctors who they feel don't believe them, or given ineffective or addictive painkillers.

So does this mean we can think our way into or out of pain? To find out, Wager and his colleagues used fMRI to look at the brain activity of 33 healthy adults while they were feeling pain.

A sparrow’s song may sound simple, consisting of little more than whistles and trills. But to the sparrows, those few noises can take on vastly different meanings depending on small variations in context and repetition, researchers have found.

n humans, the ability to extract nearly endless meanings from a finite number of sounds, known as partial phonemic overlapping, was key to the development of language

Babies' memory develops while napping: study For babies, the best time to learn something is right before a nap of at least 30 minutes, according to a new study. (ambrozinio/shuttersto

babies

Naps during the day of at least a half hour help infants retain new behaviors learned earlier, according to researchers from the University of Sheffield

The old adage about leaving your emotions at the door before stepping into the office is dead, according to a recent study from the University of Bonn. Published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in November 2014, the study showed individuals who displayed emotional intelligence—the ability to discern other people’s emotions—were more likely to bring home a bigger paycheck than their emotionally-stunted colleagues.

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"Emotional intelligence is the ability for people to be able to recognize emotions in oneself and others,"

Jury selection continues for the second week in the trial of accused Boston Marathon bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Later this week, the judge, prosecutors and defense attorneys are expected to question prospective jurors. They will ask about jurors’ backgrounds, their feelings about the death penalty and whether they already have an opinion about Tsarnaev.

. Some say brain science is likely to play a role in the trial, because courts are increasingly looking at what neuroscience tells us about adolescence and the developing brain.

Science has shown how certain sounds can make crisps taste crunchier, oysters taste saltier, and aeroplane food taste bad. 

People in their 70s are helping scientists in Edinburgh investigate the effects of ageing on the brain.

Part of the study sees volunteers re-take tests that they first carried out when they were young children, to see how their mental abilities have changed.