neuroscience
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Will There Ever Be a ‘Cure’ for Addiction?
Up top we should note that there are many different kinds of addiction, and many different kinds of people, and many complicated and contradictory theories re: addiction’s psychological/physiological mechanisms. There are various approaches to treating addiction as well. Proponents of a “harm reduction” strategy aren’t necessarily interested in reducing people’s drug use, for instance, but…
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5-Day Brain Stimulation Treatment Highly Effective Against Depression, Stanford Researchers Find
Stanford researchers think they’ve devised an effective and quick-acting way to treat difficult cases of depression, by improving on an already approved form of brain stimulation. In a new trial published this week, the researchers found that almost 80% of patients improved after going through treatment — a far higher rate than those who were…
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Will We Ever Be Able to Edit or Delete Memories?
Impossible even to broach this subject without reference to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which an unkempt Jim Carrey enlists a legitimate if shoddily run medical firm to erase the memory of his ex-girlfriend. If that film had a message, it was almost certainly not “erasing memories is good,” but that is not…
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Like ‘A Part of Their Body’: People Adapt to an Extra Thumb in Fascinating Experiment
An experiment in which 36 people were fitted with a robotic third thumb has demonstrated the brain’s uncanny ability to adapt and leverage an entirely new body part, and in ways the researchers are still trying to understand.