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June 17, 2013 Scientists and parents have long been baffled by the fact that children with autism often don't pay attention to human voices. Researchers say that may be because speech doesn't activate a reward system in the brain for those children the way it does for typical children.

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May 2, 2013 Linguists used to think the human brain had a specific region devoted to understanding language. But brain scans now indicate that regions controlling vision, movement, taste, smell and touch are all called into action when we think of a word, too.

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April 4, 2013 Philosophers, poets and psychologists have long shared a fascination with dreams. Now Japanese scientists have scanned the brains of dreaming volunteers to create a lexicon of imagery that can be used to detect and decode dreams while a person sleeps.

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April 3, 2013 What can we say about how the brain creates our sense of self? A lot and yet surprisingly little, as it turns out. Commentator Marcelo Gleiser ponders the many challenges scientists face to make sense of our mind.

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March 7, 2013 For more than a century, neurons have been the superstars of the brain. Now researchers say that when they placed human versions of another type of brain cell into mice brains, the mice grew up to be faster learners. This supports the hypothesis that these glial cells — and not just better-known neurons — play an important role in learning.

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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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