Mind Your Cs and Gs

Microbes Manipulate Your Mind

Take Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite. When mice are infected by it, they suffer the grave misfortune of becoming attracted to cats. Once a cat inevitably consumes the doomed creature, the parasite can complete its life cycle inside its new host. Or consider Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus that can grow into the brain of an insect. The fungus can force an ant to climb a plant befor...

What's in your Mind?

Neuropsychologists have an advantage on us dry Cognitive Scientists: They always have impressive color slides of PET or MRI or fMRI images showing the exact location of whatever they wish to discuss — the soul or the locus of sinful thoughts or the center of consciousness. If one were to go by popular science articles on the brain one would have to conclude that we know where everything is loca...

Changing your mind.

When individuals detect an inconsistency in a set of propositions, they tend to change their minds about at least one proposition to resolve the inconsistency. The orthodox view from William James (1907) onward has been that a rational change should be minimal. We propose an alternative hypothesis according to which individuals seek to resolve inconsistencies by explaining their origins. We rep...

DARPA on your mind.

Applied science may once again play a decisive role in changing the face of armed conflict, and the rest of human affairs, by shifting the battlefield to our very brains. The national-security establishment--and particularly the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)--supports research at the intersection of neuroscience and national security that could ultimately enable a...

Reading your baby's mind.