Hugging is a particularly intimate and intense way to express emotions. Through a hug we can convey joy or sorrow, we can say to a person that can count on us unconditionally and understand his state of mind without speaking. But the fact is that embraces not only help us connect with others and express what we feel, also have a very positve effect on the emotional balance and brain health.

A person with a brain chip can now pilot a swarm of drones — or even advanced fighter jets, thanks to research funded by the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. The work builds on research from 2015, which allowed a paralyzed woman to steer a virtual F-35 Joint Strike Fighter with only a small, surgically-implantable microchip. On Thursday, agency officials announced that they had scaled up the technology to allow a user to steer multiple jets at once.

It’s hard to overstate the benefits of a night’s rest for human memory, and neuroscientists are just beginning to understand why. Jakke Tamminen has plenty of students who do that very studenty thing of staying up all night right before an exam, in the hope of stuffing in as much knowledge as they can. But “that’s the worst thing you can do”, the psychology lecturer at the UK’s Royal Holloway University warns them.

Ever wonder why some people seem to feel less pain than others? A study conducted at Wake Forest School of Medicine may have found one of the answers—mindfulness. "Mindfulness is related to being aware of the present moment without too much emotional reaction or judgment," said the study's lead author, Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurobiology and anatomy at the medical school, part of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. "We now know that some people are more mindful than others, and those people seemingly feel less pain."

What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

In an effort to research how certain personality traits protect against emotional distress, such as depression and anxiety, researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois examined 85 healthy college students. The study, “Neuro-Behavioral Mechanisms of Resilience against Emotional Distress: An Integrative Brain-Personality-Symptom Approach using Structural Equation Modeling,” was published in the August edition of Personality Neuroscience.

Impact of high levels of toxic air ‘is equivalent to having lost a year of education’

A new study sheds light on the neural basis of dishonest behavior in psychopathic individuals. The new research has been published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. “For many years, I have studied the neural basis of deception using a cognitive neuroscience approach,” said study author Nobuhito Abe of the Kokoro Research Center at Kyoto University.

They're incredible. Amazing. Magical. But perhaps the most fantastic thing about lucid dreams – in which the dreamer becomes aware they're dreaming – is how realistic they seem.

Two papers released Wednesday in Neuron delve deep into the way we perceive the world, revealing that we don’t actually register much of it. Our attention systems, the authors show, are extremely ill-equipped for modern society. Rather than take in the world in a constant stream of information, consciousness oscillates in and out of focus, meaning that what we think we know about the world has actually just been pieced together from limited information. Their estimates of how often we are actually focused suggest we don’t know much about the world at all.

Researchers at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Norway in have discovered a network of brain cells that expresses our sense of time within experiences and memories. "This network provides timestamps for events and keeps track of the order of events within an experience," says Professor Edvard Moser, Nobel laureate and director of the Kavli Institute, which is based at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). This area of the brain where time is experienced is located right next to the area that codes for space.

For many weeks, news of a mother orca carrying her dead infant through the icy waters of the Salish Sea captured the attention of many around the world. Keeping the infant afloat as best she could, the orca, named Tahlequah, also known as J35 by scientists, persisted for 17 days, before finally dropping the dead calf.

Let’s start with the title of your latest book. Why is the mind not the brain? The shortest argument goes something like this: there’s what philosophers call a mereological fallacy. Mereology is the discipline which studies the relation between wholes and parts. So imagine someone tells you that David Beckham didn’t score a goal, it was his foot. That would be an odd thing to say because Beckham couldn’t shoot for the goal without his foot, but it was the whole beast, so to speak, which shot the goal.

A new study finds that people with larger volumes in the prefrontal cortical brain regions may be more likely to have greater personality traits that can protect against emotional distress, such as optimism. For the study, researchers at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois looked at a sample of 85 healthy college students to see how a number of personality traits can protect a person’s brain against symptoms of emotional distress, particularly depression and anxiety.

Our floodlit society has made sleep deprivation a lifestyle. But we know more than ever about how we rest—and how it keeps us healthy.

Researchers find evidence that neural systems actively remove memories, suggesting that forgetting may be the default mode of the brain.

A hypothetical model to understand how “touch” is represented in the brain.

Human herpes virus 6 and 7 were found in Alzheimer's-affected brains at levels up to twice as high as in those without Alzheimer's, the scientists reported Thursday.

Scientists find that a drug meant for another illness may significantly help Alzheimer's patients.

It’s well known that being outside among the grass and trees is good for the soul – now, it turns out, it could help stave off dementia. Spanish researchers have found that spending time in green spaces helps to keep the brain healthy, slowing down any decline in its cognitive ability. A new study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, demonstrates that the loss of cognitive function that is expected as part of the ageing process is slightly slower in people who live in greener neighbourhoods.

Several new studies have rejuvenated a long-dismissed idea that links the common brain disease to the viral infections.

We humans are deeply social creatures. We live our lives in the company of others: we work together, eat together, play together, and sleep together. Yet, for some of us, interacting with other people can really be “hell.” The prospect of talking with a stranger, ordering food in a restaurant, or speaking up in a work meeting, can, for some people, be an incredibly daunting and fear-provoking experience. This is very much the case for sufferers of “social anxiety disorder.”

Nick Chater argues our brain is a storyteller, not a reporter from an inner world.

"After sexual activity I get a strong sense of self-loathing about myself."

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?

A boy who had large parts of the right side of his brain removed due to a slow-growing tumor made a nearly full recovery in the three years after his surgery, with other areas of his brain compensating for the loss, researchers reveal this week in Cell Reports. Their case study highlights the brain’s tremendous ability to adapt to such losses and will help researchers...

What does a child's brain that repaired itself after a full third of the right hemisphere was surgically removed, teach us about all brains?

To find 25,000 participants to enroll in all the approved trials, researchers would have to begin by approaching more than 37 million people with early memory loss.

Annelise Barron is developing a way to treat Alzheimer's through the immune system.

The Lancet peer-reviewed medical journal has officially classified fluoride as a neurotoxin. Hopefully this will add weight to what a number of experts have been saying for years and help raise awareness about the dangers and the myths about its benefits. (2016)

Superbowl Sunday is expected to draw 110 million viewers tuning in to watch the big game — not including, just off the field, four independent concussion specialists strategically placed on the sidelines to quickly spot, evaluate, and treat potential head injuries that can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. First diagnosed in an NFL player in the early 2000s, CTE has been the subject of a growing body of research on the degenerative condition.

Two new papers show that an ancient virus hiding out in the human brain may play a critical role in conscious thought.

In an exclusive excerpt from his new book, Outside’s Sweat Science columnist explores the brain’s role in setting our physical limits.

Our diet has a huge effect on our brain and our mental wellbeing, even protecting against dementia. So, what should be on the menu?

​The first diagnostic blood test to evaluate the severity of a concussion has been approved for marketing by the FDA. The blood test can accurately identify patients with brain tissue damage, or intracranial lesions, following a head injury without the need for an expensive & time-consuming CT scan.