"Life without memory is no life at all," so said Luis Buñuel, the surrealist filmmaker. But do we really want every memory? Joel Barish didn't. Remember the guy played by Jim Carrey in Michel Gondry's 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? He wanted the memory of Clementine Kruczynski...

We're living in the golden age of the brain. Researchers around the world are trying to figure out how Woody Allen's "second favorite organ" works. The US Society for Neuroscience has more than 40,000 members, and the International Brain Research Organization (IBRO) puts up impressive numbers from the rest of...

I learned what a brain was by digging bullets out of them as a kid in my father's meat market in Eunice, Louisiana, deep in the heart of Cajun country. In those days, cows and pigs were killed by a 0.22 caliber right between the eyes. Sounds barbaric, but was...

How does your brain work? Why doesn't it work the way you want it to? Can you make it work better (or at least differently)? Are you in charge of your neurons and synapses, and who's the "you" that is or isn't in control? Can I answer these questions? Actually,...

Emily Dickinson said in one of her poems that "The brain is wider than the sky." I've been trying to narrow it down for the past 25 years, especially in terms of how it makes emotions, and how it goes wrong in emotional disorders. One of the key problems that...

You know the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." For many people, though, it is broken, and we need to fix it. What's broken is the brain, especially the emotional brain, and the consequence is a life dominated by mental suffering.

Emotions monopolize brain resources. That's a...