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  • Why Humans Need Fiction, According to Neuroscience

    Why Humans Need Fiction, According to Neuroscience

    What if the voice in your head is less of a witness and more of an interpreter? Two neuroscientists discuss the brain’s drive to explain, narrate, and make everything add up. Stories do not just entertain us; they may be one of the main ways our brains rehearse experience, assign meaning, and turn scattered moments into something that feels like a self. We are constantly sorting actions, memories and emotion into a version of events that feels coherent enough to live inside. Neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga, PhD and Dean Buonomano, PhD draw on split-brain research to explain the left hemisphere’s “Interpreter”: the brain’s tendency to create explanations for behavior, even when it does not have the full picture. The instinct to create narratives likely shapes far more than self-understanding. It may underpin identity, belief, and the desire to belong in the world.

  • How Hope Changes the Structure of Your Brain

    How Hope Changes the Structure of Your Brain
  • Keep Your Brain From Declining After Age 30

    Keep Your Brain From Declining After Age 30

    Every time you move your body, your brain gets what one neuroscientist calls a “bubble bath” of dopamine, serotonin, and growth factors. Here’s how to activate it. Neuroscientists Wendy Suzuki, PhD, Samuel Wang, PhD, and Gary Small, MD explain how movement increases blood flow, boosts growth factors like BDNF, and floods the brain with mood-lifting neurochemicals. The brain and body are in constant conversation, and plasticity means your wiring is never fixed. According to Suzuki, even ten minutes of walking can shift your brain’s chemistry immediately, flooding it in a ‘bubble bath’ of positive neurochemicals. In other words, the way you use your body today shapes how your brain works tomorrow.

  • The Mind-Body Connection You Never Knew You Had

    The Mind-Body Connection You Never Knew You Had

    The brain isn't separate from the body. It depends on it. Three scientists explain the biology behind one of science's most under-explored relationships. Your brain didn't evolve in isolation. It evolved to run the economy of your body, and every heartbeat, breath, and moment of thirst or anxiety is evidence of that system at work. Neuroscientist and author Aditi Nerurkar, neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, and neurologist-philosopher Antonio Damasio break down the science of the mind-body connection: why it exists, how it works, and why understanding it can change the way you experience the world.

  • The Strange Science of Your Ever-Changing Identity

    The Strange Science of Your Ever-Changing Identity

    Bad news: your sense of self is made up. The good news is, you’re able to change it. Neuroscience and psychology explain. Perception feels stable. Your sense of self feels solid. Yet neuroscientist Heather Berlin, psychologist Ethan Kross and neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explain that both are created by the brain. Through prediction, memory and neural pruning, the mind builds a narrative that feels coherent and fixed, even though modern science suggests that it’s continually shaped by pre-existing beliefs and experience. Seeing the construction clearly is the first step toward altering it.

  • What Happens to Your Brain When You’re Dreaming

    What Happens to Your Brain When You’re Dreaming

    Have you ever woken up after a dream and thought to yourself, “That made absolutely no sense”? According to modern neuroscience, there’s a reason why dreams feel so abstract and bizarre. Two sleep experts discuss. Every 90 minutes, our bodies go paralyzed while our brains become more active than during waking life. Sleep psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris and neuroscientist Dr. Patrick McNamara, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University, dig into one of the most fascinating mysteries in human biology: why we dream and what our brains are actually doing during REM sleep. They explore competing theories of what dreaming is for, McNamara makes a compelling case that REM sleep may have been a key driver of early human creativity, and both reflect on why reclaiming our reverence for the dream state could change the way we think and create.

  • The Art and Science of Failing

    The Art and Science of Failing Well

    Failure is inevitable, but your response to it is a choice – and it makes all the difference. Journalist Tim Harford, PhD, psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, and organizational behavior expert Robert Sutton, PhD, reveal how failure can become the foundation of success when it’s examined and built upon. Reframing failure as information, rather than a personal setback, is what sets productive thinkers apart.

  • 3 Experts Explain Your Brain’s Creativity Formula

    3 Experts Explain Your Brain’s Creativity Formula

    What makes the human brain capable of creativity? Neuroscientist David Eagleman, creativity researcher Scott Barry Kaufman, and productivity expert Tiago Forte each explore a different part of the puzzle: how humans evolved additional cortical “space,” how imagination builds on the knowledge we gather, and how organizing your thoughts in a “second brain” helps ideas take shape. Together, their perspectives explain why creativity depends on storing, combining, and transforming the raw material we collect over time.