Neuroscience

In this piece for The Lion's Roar, the Dalai Lama discusses some of the shortcomings of contemporary scientific methodology in understanding consciousness — primarily...

From Scientific American: Experiments in personality psychology show that people scoring high on openness to experience may literally see the world differently from the average...

In this interview for The Atlantic, James Kugel speculates on the minds and experiences of ancient prophets through a neuroscientific lens, exploring how biblical people's sense of...

From The Atlantic: Five neuroscientists have published a new paper arguing that the field of neuroscience has become too focused on technology and has de-prioritized the...

Training for conceptual competence in psychiatry provides a new way forward to address theoretical and philosophical issues in mental health research and practice.

A review article published in the International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology summarizes the latest research on the role that microbiota in the gut play in...

-An accessible explanation of what fMRI brain scan devices actually measure.

From the Center for Health Journalism: Different types of childhood adversity shape the developing brain in distinct ways and need to be addressed accordingly. While...

A fist of its kind neuroscience study, published this month in Cerebral Cortex, found changes in the brain electrical activity of infants exposed to SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy.

Writing on his critical psychiatry blog, Duncan Double critiques Joe Herbert’s piece on “Why can't we treat mental illness by fixing the brain?” in Aeon. While Herbert admits that there is a "mysterious and seemingly unfathomable gap" between psychology and neuroscience, which "bedevils not only psychiatry, but all attempts to understand the meaning of humanity,” he goes on to speculate that someday psychiatrists will be able to relate symptoms to brain activity.

From Aeon: For the past several decades, mainstream mental health professionals as well as the general public have dismissed Freud's ideas, turning instead to neuroscience...

Anthropologists analyze discourse surrounding anthropological engagement with the neurosciences in an editorial recently published in Medical Anthropology.

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is increasingly shifting its research emphasis toward attempting to uncover biomarkers for “mental diseases,” which may have dramatic consequences for research and training in clinical psychology. In an article to be published in next month’s Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, Marvin Goldfried outlines how the shift in funding priorities for psychological research is tied to the needs of pharmaceutical companies and the biological model in psychiatry.

Julia Belluz at Vox interviews Russ Poldrack, the director of the Center for Reproducible Neuroscience, on recent efforts to “clean up the house of...

Meta-analyses fail to replicate findings linking abnormal brain activity to depression.

A new study explores the impact of a Mindfulness-Based intervention on stress-related biomarkers in individuals diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

From Scientific American: Many articles and papers equate the experience of consciousness with awareness. However, the reality is that it is possible to experience consciousness without...

From Discover Magazine: Headlines in various news sources reporting on a new study claim that women's brains have been found to be more active than...

The latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences features several prominent researchers arguing that mental health concerns are not “brain disorders.”

With the explosion of genetic testing and the emerging field of pharmacogenetics, patients can now take a DNA test and receive psychiatric drug recommendations customized to fit their genetic makeup. In an editorial for the latest issue of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Columbia University Psychiatrist Robert Klitzman warns that clinicians need to be aware of the limitations of these genetic tests being marketed to them.

Boston WBUR public radio intern Suzanne Jacobs goes on a journey to find out what “computational psychiatry” is, and has some difficulty determining if...

In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Helen Shen recounts the history of how neuroscientists first discovered that the human brain had right and left hemispheres with seemingly unique functions, and how that scientific view has since been superseded even as the general public has held on and oversimplified it.

From The New York Times: In recent years, social scientists have become increasingly concerned about the "replication crisis," i.e. the dearth of reproducible research results....

-Neuroscientist Jonathan Roiser grapples with why it is that neuroscience has continued to have difficulties helping improve psychiatric treatments.

For me there are at least four separate questions to be addressed. The first is whether neuroscience is capable of understanding human emotion and higher level cognitive experiences. The second is the extent to which that understanding - even if it is achievable - is critical to our being able to help people in distress. The third is whether is it is correct to assume, as many people seem to do, that if we come to some basic understanding of brain function as it pertains to core human emotion and suffering that this will automatically translate into treatments that are commonly thought of as "biological," such as drug treatment. The fourth relates to the limitations and relevance of studying the brain in isolation when we are constantly in interaction with our environment.