kamal

Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s neuroimaging studies revealed that parts of the brain that were thought to be active only during sensory perception are also active during the recall of memories. “It started to raise … Read more

Many years ago, I learned to program on an old Symbolics Lisp Machine. The operating system had a built-in command spelled “DWIM,” short for “Do What I Mean.” If I typed a command and got an error, I could type “DWIM,” and the machine would try to figure out what I meant to do. A … Read more

There are times and places in the universe that experiments cannot reach, and may never be able to reach. What exactly goes on inside black holes, and what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, are matters of pure theoretical speculation. For two decades, Silke Weinfurtner, a physicist at the … Read more

It’s often subtle at first. A lost phone. A forgotten word. A missed appointment. By the time a person walks into a doctor’s office, worried about signs of forgetfulness or failing cognition, the changes to their brain have been long underway — changes that we don’t yet know how to stop or reverse. Alzheimer’s disease, … Read more