Background Matters

Background Music Matters: Why Strategy Video Game Increased Cognitive Control

For decades, the precise influence of video games on players has been acutely argued. During that time, researchers have also been unable to agree on the effects that video games have on cognitive control. Some researchers found that video games are detrimental to sustaining one’s attention span, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. Meanwhile, some other researchers have claimed that vide...

Philosophy matters in brain matters

PURPOSE Although most neuroscientists and physicians would argue against Cartesian dualism, Descartes's version of the psyche/soma divide, which has been controversial since he proposed it in the seventeenth century, continues to haunt contemporary neurological diagnoses through terms such as functional, organic, and psychogenic. Drawing on my own experiences as a person with medically unexplai...

Matters of sex: sex matters.

Despite the popular concept that heart disease preferentially affects the male population, in every year for the past 16 years, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men.1 Unfortunately, a disparity still exists between men and women in the diagnosis and aggressive treatment of heart disease. The perception that women are relatively protected is reflected by the fact that women are ...

Politics Matters: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Context Matters

Midbrain dopamine neurons are thought to encode the difference between predicted and actual reward on conditioning tasks. Successful models assumed a simple form of prediction that depended only on currently available information. In this issue of Neuron, Nakahara and colleagues record from dopamine neurons in alert monkeys and show that the neurons can encode predictions that are not so restri...