Scientific News
Why are green vegetables good for the brain?

Good nutrition may contribute to good cognitive health. Martha Clare Morris and her colleagues at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago wanted to study the effects of the primary and bioactive nutrients found in leafy, green vegetables (salad, cabbage, celery, etc.); namely vitamin K (phylloquinone), lutein, ...
Love at first sight: what happens in the brain?

A racing pulse, sweating, a feeling like an electric current, etc.: these physical “symptoms” are the manifestation of intense, yet uncontrolled emotions that each of us have felt in the presence of a perfect stranger. In an ...
Can we predict a person s creative potential?

For their study, Roger E. Beaty (a psychologist at Harvard) and his Austrian and Chinese colleagues focused on the neurocognitive characteristics of highly creative people. They wanted to find out whether there is a specific profile of brain connectivity in these individuals and whether ...
Can we comfort others by simply holding their hands?

Today, the analgesic powers of social interaction, empathy, and physical contact remain unclear. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) was carried out by researchers at the Universities of Colorado (US), Haifa (Israel), and Paris Diderot (France) with the goal of testing ...
When do infants start to perceive fear?

In children, the capacity to classify certain facial emotions, and particularly fear, appears at about 5-7 months. Eyes wide, eyebrows raised, mouth open: these stimuli tend to hold the baby’s attention. The researchers hypothesized that fearful ...
Can happiness be taught?

In an interview with NBC News, Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology, tells us that her class was created in reaction to the alarming research on students’ emotional health. This research made her aware of the feelings of anxiety and stress experienced by the students, many of whom feel overwhelmed by the university’s academic load, something that risks ...
Why is proper breathing so important to the brain?

For a very long time, consciously controlled breathing has been used as part of therapeutic techniques (cognitive-behavioral) whose underlying mechanisms remain largely uninvestigated. This research, published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, was designed ...
Dog versus cat: who is the smartest?

Carnivores were chosen as the subjects for this neuroanatomy study for two reasons: the wide range of their brain sizes, and the fact that they come in both wild and domesticated varieties. Indeed, for S. Herculano-Houzel (Vanderbilt University, Nashville) ...
Can meditation slow brain aging?

In 2015, a study from the University of Los Angeles highlighted the benefits of meditative techniques on the functioning and even the structure of the brain, in subjects aged 24 to 77 years. Based on the observation that physiological changes related to aging can be accelerated by ...
Can the mind be located in the brain?

Antonio Damasio is convinced that the mind is not purely cerebral, but also bodily, because “it is not only a product of the brain but also of its interaction with the body." Here's a quantifiable example (among others): if you placed all ...