brain

Do we decide before looking at the evidence? A study carried out by researchers from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico maintains that, when making decisions in contexts of great uncertainty, what we choose is not only based on sensory evidence, but also on mechanisms internal parts of the brain.

The answer is 678 nuns and a scientist. The nuns were the sisters of the Notre Dame Convent in Mankato, Minnesota, a group of particularly long-lived and lucid women. The scientist, David Snowdon, assessed the sisters' cognitive performance and analyzed their postmortem brains. His findings were surprising. The typical pathological signs of the disease appeared in the brains of many of these women. However, these same women had shown a lucidity in the last years of their lives apparently incompatible with the symptoms that we associate with Alzheimer's.

As the French neuroscientist Serge Stolerú recently demonstrated after scanning the brains of several men before and during an orgasm, in the male gray matter there are two areas, the cingulate cortex and the amygdala, which instruct the rest of the brain to deactivate any sensation of desire after sexual intercourse.

When something causes us fear, we tend to misjudge the distance at which it is located. In other words, if a spider scares us, our terrified brain makes us perceive it much closer than it really is, as published in the journal 'Current Biology' in its latest issue.

Scientists from Imperial College London (UK), led by Tony Goldstone, have shown that if we skip breakfast, hours later our brains often have "cravings" for fatty and high-calorie foods.

Absolutely. A few years ago, neuroscientist Bob Coghill and his colleagues from Wake Forest University in North Carolina (USA) analyzed the brains of several subjects with the help of nuclear magnetic resonance images while they were subjected to the same painful stimulus and found that each person has a different sensitivity to pain, and that is not always directly related to the damage received.

The brain is really amazing. Hundreds of researchers work around this organ to try to unravel its functioning and thus cope with, for example, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. One of the latest research carried out at UCLA, the University of California, has discovered that, while we sleep, our brain behaves as if it were remembering something.

Scientists at the University of Sussex (UK) have shown that chimpanzees and gorillas are, like humans, mostly right-handed. The finding disproves the idea that right-sided dominance in humans (90% of individuals are right-handed) is a unique trait of the species associated with language development.