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February 4, 2013 Some people with damage to a specific region of the brain called the amygdala do not feel fear. If you make them handle a snake or show them a scene from a scary movie such as The Shining, they won't be affected. But breathing in air with high levels of carbon dioxide can send them into a panic.

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February 4, 2013 Autism researchers are studying post-mortem brain tissue from people with the disorder to understand how it changes the brain. The greatest demand is for tissue from children. But it's especially hard to get.

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January 11, 2013 Does music have a history? Why? Listening to Bowie, and reading Gary Marcus's Guitar Zero provoke commentator Alva Noë to wonder.

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January 10, 2013 In his new book, Jared Diamond describes how readily people in small-scale societies learn to speak many distinct languages. After reading Diamond's book, commentator Barbara J. King takes time to consider what we in the U.S. may lose in a sea of monolingualism.

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December 7, 2012 We are fascinated by pictures of the brain produced by new imaging technologies. Alva Noë reminds us that these pictures are not images of the brain in action; they are not pictures of the mind at work. They are bits of theory.

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November 21, 2012 Ultrasound often catches fetuses opening their mouths, but whether they're really yawning or not has been up for debate. Now, with some fancy ultrasound techniques, scientists have show that babies do indeed yawn in the womb.

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November 15, 2012 Scientists have found rappers and jazz musicians use their brains in similar ways when it comes to improvisation. Brain scans show distinct differences in which parts of the brain are most active during rap performances of memorized pieces compared with those that are done freestyle.

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October 9, 2012 Could modern cognitive theories explain character development in one of Jane Austen's most famous heroines: Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett? Reading sessions inside an MRI scanner are shedding light on the question.

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August 20, 2012 People with extraordinary autobiographical memories also tend to have obsessive tendencies, researchers are learning. Brain scans reveal structural differences in the brains of these people, including a larger-than-normal caudate, a brain area linked to OCD.

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August 6, 2012 Graduate student Robert Lynch is on a quest to deconstruct our built-in instinct for humor, and find out why making people laugh could be important to the way we've adapted to survive.

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July 19, 2012 A part of the brain called the premotor cortex does some pretty complicated work. It's where the brain plans and strategizes about how to take action, and it may also reflect a person's personality.

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June 11, 2012 A freezer that went on the fritz damaged about one-third of the brains from autistic people being stored at a research depository near Boston. The malfunction, whose cause remains under investigation, could slow research into the disorder.

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April 4, 2012 Research finds that bilingual children are better at "executive processing," which includes being able to pay attention, plan and organize thoughts.

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March 29, 2012 The human brain may be just three pounds of jelly. But it turns out that jelly is very organized. New scanning techniques show that the brain's communications pathways are laid out in a highly ordered three-dimensional grid that look a bit like a map of Manhattan.

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On All Things ConsideredPlaylist

February 3, 2012 Research on decoding language within the brain opens up new prospects for communicating with incapacitated people. Some, however, worry that it could also be a threat to privacy. Commentator Alva Noe says not to worry, we are already excellent mind readers.

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