Mindframe

When General George Armstrong Custer made the ill-fated decision to charge his 700 troops into the heart of the Lakota Nation on June 25 th 1876, it represented a pretty steep learning curve for the General—steep and deadly.   Neuroscientists know that extreme events that end in failure will create memories that tend to stick with us. Since your brain is built to keep you alive, it recruits your hippocampus and amygdala to remember those moments that put you at risk in the hope that you will recognize the same pattern and avoid it in the future. That is, of course, if you manage to live through the situation the first time around.   Each of us can witness a whole host of these events. Car crashes, break ups, bad weekends in Vegas—you get the idea.  Your brain makes those kinds of memories available to you at all times, unlike your misplaced hotel room key or the new password for your Amazon account. A moth, on the other hand, does not seem to have the benefi...

How do I know Thanksgiving is over? I simply look out the back window of my home to witness the brilliant array of Christmas lights. To be fair, my neighbor's lights have been up for quite a while. It appears that he starts his lighting festivities earlier every year, which means at some point in the future his Christmas lights will actually usher in the Christmas of the following year. Lights tend to grab our attention. And there is a reason for this, according to John Medina, the author of Brain Rules.  Our brains are predisposed to pay attention to things that jump out at us. In fact. the brain, the amygdala in particular, follows a pretty basic checklist upon observing anything new or out of the ordinary.    Medina says the amygdala processes emotionally charged events and uses dopamine as a kind of chemical post-it note to aid in making sure the event is remembered (I don’t know which came first--the Post-it note or the amygdala. I suspect the Post-it note; 3...

The problem with you––and by you, I mean me––is that our brains are built on a 40,000 year old platform. Let's not forget, evolution is a slow process. We haven't had any significant brain upgrade since our ancient ancestors started sprucing up their cave walls with paintings of local fauna. We may marvel at our technological advancements, but despite our ability to hurl metal objects and ideas through space, we are basically cave dwellers dressed in modern garb. In fact, the technology we all enjoy (most of the time) was the work of only a few individuals. Who among us, if teleported back 40,000 years could reproduce an iPhone, a cylinder lock, or even a porcelain toilet? You get the idea. Imagine a stunning technological advancement, one that almost seems like magic. It's a method of communication that allows us to share ideas like never before. Suddenly, news can cross an ocean before you cross the street. You can read about the results of a battle in Europe as th...

So imagine it’s 1826 and you want to know what the weather will be doing tomorrow. You really have one choice: pull out your trusty Farmer’s Almanac and get down to business. The Almanac is still around today. As Sandy Duncan, managing editor, says, “The formula we use dates back to 1818. It is a mathematical and astronomical formula that takes sunspot activity, tidal action of the moon and position of the planets into consideration. The complete formula is known only by our weather prognosticator: Caleb Weatherbee." Sounds pretty cool. There’s only one problem: analysis shows that its accuracy falls in the 50/50 range. That is to say, garden variety coin toss territory. So, would I be better off checking in with the National Weather Service? In short: yes. Meteorology has come a long way since 1818. No longer must we rely on the whims of a man named Caleb. Now we can pull up software that feeds past weather results, current temperature, wind and precipitation patterns ...

When was the last time you had a three-foot tamping rod blow through your prefrontal cortex, taking with it about a half teacupful of brain matter? If your name is Phineas Gage, it was 164 years and 53 days ago, and it happened at 4:30 in the afternoon while you were setting explosives for the Burlington railroad in Vermont. Miraculously, in defiance of Victorian medical science and common sense, Gage lived. His personality, however, was forever altered. This is one of the most cited neuroscience cases out there because it tells us a few key things about the nature of the prefrontal cortex, that processing center in your skull just above your eyebrows. The prefrontal cortex does a lot of cool stuff. It is, among other things, home to your willpower. Neuroscientists frequently say we have one brain and two minds. By this they mean we have a processing center for emotions, the part of the brain that reaches for the glazed donut, and another mind, the part of the brain that reminds...