Mindframe

As Halloween approaches, let’s pause for a moment to consider a common piece of creepy iconography in Western culture: the bat. Associated as they are with darkness, caves, leathery skin stretched over bony wing bones—and yes, in the case of the vampire bat, blood-sucking—it’s no wonder they’ve become a symbol of all things spooky. Yet, there’s more to these humble non-rodents than thrills and chills. Scientists hope their brains might hold the key to a human mystery: just how do we track the relative position of people around us? Luckily, "A bat's hippocampus is very similar to a human's,” Professor Nachum Ulanovsky of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel told Phys.org . “The hippocampus is very important for things like spatial and social memory." And while bats are not the smartest member of the animal kingdom—they don’t have the tool use of elephants or the trickery of corvids—they are highly social creatures, as well as famously good navigators. ...

Studies show that senior citizens are more connected to the web than ever before. According to the Pew Research Group , smartphone ownership among those 65 and older has increased by 24 percentage points since just 2013, and more than a third of this group use social media.   And that’s potentially a good thing, says new research from the University of Michigan. By now, we’re all familiar with the complaints against social media. It shortens attention spans. It decreases face-to-face social skills. We don’t notice the world around us when all we do is stare at our phones all day. We are becoming a nation of screen-obsessed zombies. However, there’s a flip side to that Facebook habit. As Western society has moved away from a family model in which elders continue living with their offspring, isolation has increasingly become standard for those living in their golden years. Friends and spouses die, seniors relocate to nursing homes or other care facilities far from their...

    “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift in 1710. Variations of the saying, including the punchier "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” have been ( likely incorrectly ) attributed to everyone from Winston Churchill to Mark Twain, but the timeless truth remains: it’s amazing how catchy an outright falsehood can be. Since at least the days of the newspaper wars between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, on some level less-than-scrupulous media outlets have understood that our faster, more reactive brain systems bias us towards internalizing more emotional, good-vs-evil stories—especially when the “good” and “evil” in question align with our own prejudices. For instance, in the late 1890’s, Hearst’s papers whipped up a frenzy of anti-Spanish sentiment, characterized by unproven claims, propaganda, and bold-faced lies. “When the USS Maine exploded and sank in Hava...

If you’re not, say, a recent time traveler from the Middle Ages, by now you’ve probably heard that exercise is good for you. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you likely also know that exercise benefits the brain in a seemingly ever-expanding list of ways. Regular aerobic activity has been found to increase memory, boost cognitive skills, fight depression, and slow the effects of age-related mental fog, among other things. There’s just one problem: it’s not necessarily a good time.   For the less athletic among us, mention of exercise can conjure flashbacks of high school gym class, of dodgeball injuries and rope-climbing humiliations. And while the ability to make a mad dash for it has surely saved our species on countless occasions, the body may not feel rewarded in the early days of a jogging routine. Some can rely on the rosy glow of personal satisfaction and the legendary “runner’s high” to stay on the exercise train, while others may need a bit more of an incent...