Category: Cognitive

By Julia Gendin

Bundy, Dahmer, Wuornos. Their stories were always ridiculously captivating to me! Reading about them makes me  wonder: what’s happening in their brains? Are serial killers simply born different, or are their behaviors shaped by their environments? 

Luckily, neuroscience can help answer these questions! By examining the lives and brains of specific killers, we can start to map the monstrous onto the biological.

By Amishi Patil

There is a popular myth that claims that men and women’s brains process information differently, which can lead to different decision making, thinking, learning, etc. In our daily lives, we often hear that men are more “logical” and women are more “emotional”. However, scientific research does not support the distinction between the “male” and “female” brain. This idea is a myth that society uses to perpetuate gender norms and stereotypes. 

By Maya Zubrinsky

After an especially long day, you finally get home and begin to wind down. Naturally, without even thinking, you open TikTok. You swipe through an algorithm that feeds you exactly what you are craving— instant gratification. As short-form videos go by, so do minutes, and suddenly it's been an hour that you feel you have wasted. Yet, nothing is compelling you to stop. Why do we passively rot a brain that is capable of so much more? 

By Diya Dronavadhyala

With Halloween creeping closer and closer, it feels like everyone’s watching something spooky. From replaying classics like It and The Shining to streaming the latest releases like Wednesday on Netflix, scary season is in full bloom this October. Spines tingling, palms sweaty, we subject ourselves to late nights of caramel popcorn and horror movie marathons. But what intrinsic qualities make us humans so obsessed with being scared? What keeps us coming back to the jump scares and psychological thrills in Halloween media? To answer these questions, we can turn to neuroscience to understand the fundamentals of what makes us scared in the first place.