Tag: neuroscience

Declining Dementia

Dementia is a significant health burden of increasing significance as our population ages. Worldwide the prevalence of dementia is 5-7% in people 60 years and older, with risk doubling every 5 years after age 60. About 5.4 million Americans are living with dementia. Dementia is a general category referring to a chronic decline in overall cognitive function. The most common cause of...

/ November 23, 2016

A New Collaborative in Neuroscience

A recent comment in the journal Nature makes a bold proposal – to form a true multi-lab cooperative to perform collective research into the deep questions of neuroscience. There are two aspects of this proposal that are extremely interesting: the potential to make significant progress in answering the biggest questions in neuroscience, and the collaborative approach to research being proposed. How does...

/ November 9, 2016

Brain-Based Learning, Myth versus Reality: Testing Learning Styles and Dual Coding 

Ed. Note: Today we present a guest post from Josh Cuevas, a cognitive psychologist and assistant professor in the College of Education at the University of North Georgia. Enjoy! Breaking the cycle Since early on in graduate school when I began studying cognition, I’ve followed the learning styles movement because it was such a powerful phenomenon. It took hold rapidly, seemingly overnight,...

/ October 12, 2014

Brainwashed: Neuroscience and Its Perversions

Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld have written a new book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. Its purpose is not to critique neuroscience, but to expose and protest its mindless oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains. The brain is a wondrous thing: “…the three pound universe between our ears has more connections than...

/ August 20, 2013

A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind

In his first book, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Wrong, neurologist Robert Burton showed that our certainty that we are right has nothing to do with how right we are. He explained how brain mechanisms can make us feel even more confident about false beliefs than about true ones. Now, in a new book, A Skeptic’s Guide...

/ April 30, 2013