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The brain

The organ that studies itself, badly.

22: in science
12:49: average
282 min: in total
26: across the network

The brain across the network →

All briefs22

Cocktail party effect

Colin Cherry named the cocktail party problem in 1953 after studying how people follow one conversation among many, and found listeners still noticed their own name in speech they were supposedly ignoring — a small detail that broke the theory built to explain it.

Brain-derived neurotrophic factor

Yves-Alain Barde

BDNF was isolated from pig brain tissue in 1982 by Yves-Alain Barde and Hans Thoenen, identifying it as a distinct protein.

Universal grammar

Chomsky's claim that children are born with an innate grammatical template has narrowed over sixty years to a single computational operation, and remains genuinely contested rather than settled either way.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging

Seiji Ogawa

Ogawa’s 1990 work established the BOLD effect — a measurable, oxygenation-dependent MRI signal shift in rodent brain tissue — verified with blood samples and EEG correlation. It is the physical foundation of human fMRI, but maps vascular response, not neural activity directly.

Melatonin

American and European sleep guidelines look at the same melatonin evidence and reach opposite conclusions about treating insomnia, and this brief follows that split alongside what melatonin actually does in the body before it ever reaches a bottle.

Neurotransmitter

Otto Loewi's 1921 experiment transferred fluid from one stimulated frog heart to a second, unconnected heart, and it slowed too — evidence that nerves signal with a released chemical rather than electricity alone, and the start of a search for what else nerves release.

Henry Molaison

Henry Molaison's 1953 surgery destroyed his ability to form new memories but left skill learning intact, giving Brenda Milner decades of evidence that declarative and procedural memory are genuinely separate systems.

REM rebound

William Dement's REM-deprivation experiments showed the brain pushes back when a sleep stage is withheld, and that push-back, not sleep loss in general, is what REM rebound actually measures.

Adult neurogenesis

In November 1998 Peter Eriksson and Fred Gage reported that the adult human brain does, after all, grow new neurons, overturning decades of dogma that people are born with a fixed supply — a claim a prominent 2018 study concluded may not hold in adults at all.

Color constancy

Edwin Land, better known for instant photography, showed in 1959 that projecting light from just two narrow wavebands could still make an audience see a full range of colour — evidence that colour depends on the brain comparing surfaces, not reading wavelength alone.

Long-term potentiation

In 1973 Timothy Bliss and Terje Lømo showed that briefly stimulating a pathway in a rabbit's brain left its synapses firing harder for hours afterward — physical evidence for Donald Hebb's 1949 idea that repeated use is what strengthens a connection between neurons.

Mirror neuron

In the early 1990s a Parma laboratory found monkey brain cells that fired both when the animal grasped food and when it merely watched someone else grasp it — a finding since stretched into theories of empathy, language and autism that the evidence itself struggles to support.

Neuroplasticity

Michael Merzenich's monkey experiments in the 1980s showed a hand map in the brain redrawing itself after nerve surgery, overturning the assumption that adult brain wiring was fixed — a finding since used, and sometimes oversold, to build a commercial brain-training industry.

Prion

Stanley Prusiner proposed that an infectious agent could be a misfolded protein with no genetic material at all — a claim his own field initially rejected as impossible.

Rapid eye movement sleep

Kleitman and Aserinsky's 1953 discovery gave dream research a measurable brain state, rapid eye movement sleep, but seven decades on, what REM sleep actually evolved to do remains a genuinely open question.

Synesthesia

A rigorous population study put synesthesia, the blending of senses so letters carry colour or sounds carry taste, at 4.4 per cent of people — far below folklore's one in four, and far above the one-in-tens-of-thousands earlier, self-selected samples had produced.

James J. Gibson

James Gibson argued that we perceive a chair or a staircase directly as something to sit on or climb, not as raw shape our brain then interprets — a claim that gave design and robotics the word affordance, which promptly split into two incompatible meanings.

Enkephalin

In 1975 researchers identified enkephalin, a chain of just five amino acids made in the brain, as a substance the body produces on its own that binds the very receptors morphine does — the first sign of a whole family of the body's own pain and reward chemistry.

Patch clamp

Sealing a glass pipette tightly enough against a cell membrane cut background electrical noise so far down that Erwin Neher and Bert Sakmann could finally watch a single ion channel molecule opening and closing, something no earlier technique could isolate at all.

Split-brain

Sperry and Gazzaniga's split-brain experiments showed real hemisphere specialisation and a left-brain 'interpreter' that invents confident reasons for actions it didn't cause, but not the tidy left-brain, right-brain myth it spawned.

Ion channel

Roderick MacKinnon's 1998 crystal structure of a bacterial potassium channel showed the shape that lets potassium pass freely while turning away the smaller sodium ion — a puzzle that had stood since Hodgkin and Huxley's electrical studies of the 1950s.

Theory of mind

Wimmer and Perner's 1983 false-belief task, staged as the Sally-Anne test with two dolls and a moved marble, showed children under about four cannot yet grasp that someone else can believe something the child knows to be false — a milestone since disputed on what it measures.