·Neuroscience
The vagus nerve, demystified
Social media has turned the vagus nerve into a magic switch. The actual nerve is more interesting, and more limited, than the hype.
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Notes on the brain, brain health, and what we are building.
·Neuroscience
The neuroscience of grief
Grief feels like physical pain because, in the brain, it largely is. A short look at what happens when we lose someone, and why it takes so long.
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Trauma Is Not Just in Your Head. It Is in Your Brain. Here Is What That Means.
Trauma does not just affect how you feel. It physically changes the structure of your brain. The good news is that those changes are not permanent.
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Why some people remember their dreams (and others don't)
Everyone dreams. Not everyone remembers it. The difference is mostly down to what happens in the few seconds after you wake up.
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Why You Make Terrible Decisions When You Are Hungry, Tired, or Stressed
It is not a character flaw. Your brain has a decision-making budget, and by the time you are hungry, exhausted, or overwhelmed, it is completely overdrawn.
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Why Losing Weight Is Hard: Your Brain Is Working Against You
You are not lazy. You do not lack discipline. When you try to lose weight, your brain launches a biological counter-attack. Here is what is actually happening inside your head.
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Your Gut Has a Mind of Its Own. Here's What That Actually Means
That 'gut feeling' is more real than you think. Scientists have discovered your gut and brain are in constant conversation, and it affects everything.
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The brain has started to publish
AI can now reconstruct what you are hearing, watching, or imagining from a brain scan. Not perfectly. Not without cooperation. But well enough to change neuroscience.
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Two ages, one body: the case for thinking in brain years
Calendar age tells you how long you have been alive. Brain age tells you something different — and often more useful.
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Why the brain consumes 20% of your energy
A look at the metabolic cost of cognition and why the human brain is so expensive to run.
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86 billion reasons to stay curious
A short meditation on the scale of the human brain, and what we still do not understand about it.
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The default mode network — what your brain is really doing when you zone out.
Daydreaming feels like doing nothing, but your brain is actually running one of its most powerful systems. Scientists call it the default mode network.
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Loneliness Is Not Just Painful. It Is Physically Damaging Your Brain.
A landmark study found that lacking social connection carries the same health risk as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Here's what loneliness actually does to the brain.
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Why Bad Habits Are So Hard to Break (And Good Ones So Hard to Form)
It's not a lack of willpower. Your brain is literally wired to keep doing what it has always done. Here's what's actually going on inside your head.
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Your Brain Washes Itself While You Sleep. Here's Why That Matters.
Every night, your brain runs a biological cleaning cycle that flushes out toxic waste. Miss enough sleep and that waste starts to build up in ways that can last a lifetime.
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One Night of Sleep Can Reveal Your Risk of 130 Diseases. Here's How.
Stanford researchers built an AI that reads a single night of sleep data and predicts your risk of diseases years before any symptoms show up.
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