In my last post I commented about the link between the brain and the mind. That post received so much interest and so many comments from all perspectives that I thought it would be useful to explore the topic more systematically. Nobody should be mistaken about the cultural...

Neuroscientists understand, at least in general, how the biological machinery of the brain can compute information. But how does a brain become aware of information? What is sentience itself? When a specific part of the brain is damaged, does the patient lose only a specific category of knowledge, such as...

Homo sapiens evolved to be socially intelligent. Over millions of years, perhaps more, the primate brain evolved special machinery to allow us to think socially, to build abstract concepts of each other's minds and to react emotionally to each other in a way that more or less maintains the social...

The Casey Anthony trial was all about moral judgment -- the moral judgment of Casey Anthony, and in the end, the final judgment of the jury. How do people make moral judgments? How do they choose A over B? Especially given the shocking nature of the jurors' decision, how can...

As a neuroscientist, I have often wondered -- what is the source of my relationship to music? A great deal is known about how sounds are processed in the brain, and at least a little is known about how the syntax of music is perceived. But what about reverence for...

For 20 years at Princeton University I studied how the brain processes sensory information and controls movement, but lately I've become interested in a more esoteric question, the big question of neuroscience: the brain basis of consciousness. There is now a conceptually simple theory that in principle can account for...

Whether you inhabit religion from the inside, or view it from a cultural distance, surely it is clear in either case that religion is something that changes through time, that the parts of religion that work well tend to spread, and that the parts that work poorly tend to die...