brain on Thought Life

Did you know that more has been discovered about our minds in the last twenty years than in all the time before that? Did you know that an estimated 60 to 80 percent of visits to primary care physicia...

Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us top living out of imagination and st...

Neuroimaging has shown that as we age, our cognitive center of gravity shifts from the imaginative right brain to the logical left brain. At some point, most of us top living out of imagination and st...

How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos?

Breathing is the bridge between the brain and the body.

Shaped a little like a loaf of French country bread, our brain is a crowded chemistry lab, bustling with nonstop neural conversations….Imagine the brain, that shiny mound of being, that mouse-gray par...

The prefrontal cortex is responsible for the success of the human species. It enables us to learn from our mistakes and make plans. When the PFC is healthy, we behave consistently in ways that enable ...

Why can’t our brains take something we intellectually know, something that seems easy, and process it into something we just get with our whole selves.

Joy is the foundation of our identity and our resilience. Our neural pathways are wired as a result of our early experiences of joy. Without a strong foundation of joy, we struggle for identity and ar...

Our brains need to engage and make decisions again, instead of floating along the paths of least resistance.

A man with so large a brain must have something in it.

A mind is more like a pile of millions of little rocks than a single big boulder. To change a mind, we need to carry thousands of little rocks from one pile to another, one at a time. This is because ...

I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.

Most of us have spent some time wondering how our brain works. Brain scientists spend their entire lives pondering it, looking for a way to begin asking the question, How does the brain generate mind?...

Social media addiction also changes our neurochemistry: our slumped posture produces cortisol; the backlit phone and blue light can suppress melatonin (needed for sleep); and a recent study with “hard...

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount o...

Because important things go in a case. You got a skull for your brain, a plastic sleeve for your comb, and a wallet for your money.

Does it matter which God-concept we hold to? Recent brain research by Dr. Newberg at the University of Pennsylvania has documented that all forms of contemplative meditation were associated with posit...

Studies show we actually get a dopamine hit when we think we’re proven right. We can literally become addicted to the sensation of our rightness. “Your body does not discriminate against pleasure,” wr...

In his book The DNA of Relationships counselor Gary Smalley argues from countless hours of research and observation alongside the wisdom of the Bible that we are hardwired for relationship. This i...

An intimate acquaintance with some of the structural features of the human brain is thus seen to be not only necessary to the physician, but also to the psychologist, the educationalist, and the socia...

I study the brain, the organ responsible for Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Bernadette studies yeast, the organism responsible for Michelob Light.

Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate.

The human brain is truly the most sophisticated, elegant, biological piece of machinery ever known.

The picture's pretty bleak, gentlemen... The world's climates are changing, the mammals are taking over, and we all have a brain about the size of a walnut.

In 1951, Isaiah Berlin wrote an essay about War and Peace and gave it a room-emptying title: “Leo Tolstoy’s Historical Skepticism.” Berlin’s publisher loved the essay but hated the headline, so he cha...

Now, what is the heart? Neurologically speaking the “heart” is the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the part of the brain right between your eyes and slightly back from your forehead. It is in this br...

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons. Although that extraordinary number is of the same...

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single p...

Made up of a dozen billion microscopic nerve-cell units interconnected by millions upon millions of conducting nerve-threads weaving incredibly intricate patterns, the brain, as an object of research,...