Although depression is one of the leading psychiatric disorders in Germany, its cause remains unclear. A recent study at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig, Germany, and the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of the University Clinic in Leipzig found that those affected by depressive disorder have a larger hypothalamus compared to their healthy counterparts.

You are in a strange neighbourhood, your cell phone’s dead, and you desperately need to find the closest garage. A couple of people on the street chime in, each sending you in opposite directions. One person sounds like a local and speaks in a nonchalant manner, while the other uses a loud, confident voice but speaks with a strong accent. Who are you going to trust? A recently published study shows that unless they speak in a confident tone of voice, you’re less likely to believe someone who speaks with an accent. And, interestingly, as you make this decision different parts of your brain are activated...

A study in mice hints at a new approach for thwarting neurodegenerative diseases—but many questions remain.

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.

Money has poured into Alzheimer's research, but until very recently not much of it went toward investigating infection in causing dementia. A million dollar prize may lead more scientists to try.

On Amazon, you can shell out about $15 to buy pills made of cellulose, titanium dioxide, gelatin, and dye. None of these ingredients have any medical effect, but customers report taking these pills for pain relief, to reduce excessive sweating, and even to quit smoking. It’s not surprising, really. Medical quackery has a long and proud history, and so long as there’s gullible people, there will be somebody selling snake oil. But here’s the rub: Right on the bottle, in big, blue letters is the word “placebo.” The only claim the manufacturer makes about these pills is that they are guaranteed not to contain any kind of medicine.

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.

As a type of immune cell, it has always been considered one of the good guys. But in a stunning breakthrough in schizophrenia research, scientists say the "macrophage" immune cell can go rogue, causing havoc in the brain. "Macrophage" means "big eaters" in Greek and is a fitting name for the cell because - when behaving - it digests cellular debris and foreign substances.

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.

What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

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.

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."

In moderation, religious and spiritual practices can be great for a person’s life and mental well-being. But religious fundamentalism—which refers to the belief in the absolute authority of a religious text or leaders—is almost never good for an individual. This is primarily because fundamentalism discourages any logical reasoning or scientific evidence that challenges its scripture, making it inherently maladaptive.

The pursuit of perfection, taken to extremes, can lead to OCD and depression – and the number of students reporting the problem has jumped by 33% since 1989

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.

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

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...

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

Tests stating staff suffered brain damage were ‘misinterpreted’ and ruled out other explanations such as mass psychogenic illness

Autism can be spotted in babies as young as four months old simply by monitoring their response to games such as peek-a-boo or incy-wincy spider, a new study suggests.

The Netherlands is pioneering new ways to treat dementia, with sensory aids, soothing music and other tools to calm and nurture patients.

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

Barn owls have simpler brains than primates, but they can process information about things moving in their environment in a similarly complex way.

It's a psychological quirk that when something becomes rarer, people may spot it in more places than ever. What is the 'concept creep' that lets context change how we categorize the world around us?

Growing evidence suggests that hallucinogenic drugs can help quell depression. Following the government’s review of medicinal cannabis last month, Jack Dutton asks whether we are at a turning point in drug policy

Sports fans aren’t typically in the mood for academic research in the minutes before a big game. But Paul Bernhardt, an aspiring young behavioral scientist at Georgia State University, was determined. Armed with a bag of sterile vials, Bernhardt inched through the crowd at Atlanta’s Omni arena, politely asking anyone decked out in either University of Georgia or Georgia Tech basketball garb—the teams that were set to battle that evening—for a bit of saliva.

Bill Gates believes we need a better way of diagnosing Alzheimer’s before we’re able to slow the progression of the disease.

A "concussion pill" under development in Miami using cannabis is showing progress for treatment of traumatic brain injuries. In a pre-clinical study, the combination of a hemp-derived cannabinoid and an NMDA amino acid anesthetic is showing improved cognitive function in rodents with traumatic brain injuries compared with individual components.

Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields may have adverse effects on the development of memory performance of specific brain regions exposed during mobile phone use, suggests a recent study involving nearly 700 adolescents in Switzerland.

Every year, 10,000 people die due to a stroke in the Netherlands alone. AI and blockchain are part of the innovative technologies being used to improve the outcome.

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

For years, scientists have been exploring how we can use signals from the brain to control prosthetic limbs. Usually, this work is focused on restoring motor function to people who have lost an arm or a leg, but new research from Japan shows how the same technology can also be used to augment existing human capabilities.

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?

The author of This Is Your Brain on Music talks about the very human ways the mind and body keep the beat.