Brain Stories's blog

Welcome to Brain Stories

Curious about the brain? About behavior and experiences/feelings, your own and other people's? There's lots on Serendip to help you think about such things, and to encourage you to develop new understandings and new questions about them, including a whole section on Brain and Behavior and another on Mental Health. And, of course, there are new observations being made all of the time, reported in professional journals, newspapers, magazines, books, and on the web.

Brain Stories - Matters Arising

An evolving list of recent findings/news stories worth mulling/developing into essays here ...

Neurodiversity

Learning from "From the Inside":
A Neurodiverse World

Paul Grobstein
August 2009

The Brain's Constructions and Deconstructions of "Reality"

Illusions, ambiguous figures, and impossible figures:
informed guessing and beyond

Genes, Brains, and Being Social

The Gregarious Brain
David Dobbs
New York Times Magazine, July 8, 2007
(excerpts for discussion)

"If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams Syndrome, [s]he'll live with some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or , less formally, the 'Williams personality': a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition.

Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science

Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science
Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg
Science 316: 996-997, 2007 (18 May)
(excerpts for discussion)