The Itch
What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.
What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.
Atul Gawande New Yorker Jun 2008 30min Permalink
The life and work of a Manhattan psychoanalyst.
Janet Malcolm New Yorker Nov 1980 1h10min Permalink
On LeBron James’s photographic memory.
Brian Windhorst ESPN Jul 2014 15min Permalink
In experiments on pig organs, scientists at Yale made a discovery that could someday challenge our understanding of what it means to die.
Matthew Shaer New York Times Magazine Jul 2019 35min Permalink
Discovering why we hurt.
Nicola Twilley New Yorker May 2016 25min Permalink
Around 60 people in the world share a condition called “highly superior autobiographical memory.” They remember absolutely everything.
Linda Rodriguez McRobbie The Guardian Feb 2017 25min Permalink
Life with chronic migraines.
Anna Altman n+1 Oct 2016 20min Permalink
One woman’s hunt for possibility after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
N.R. Kleinfeld New York Times Apr 2016 1h25min Permalink
Susie McKinnon cannot hold a grudge. She is unfamiliar with the feeling of regret and oblivious to aging. She has no core memories. And yet she knows who she is.
Erika Hayasaki Wired Apr 2016 Permalink
Phil Kennedy set out to build the ultimate brain-computer interface. In the process, he almost lost his mind.
Daniel Engber Wired Jan 2016 20min Permalink
“When I woke up hours later, I really believed I had been in those mountains hiking — that it was not a dream. And I really had lost my voice. I had lost my words. I was unable to say, ‘I am trapped in my brain’ or, ‘My memories are mixing with imagination.’”
Christine Hyung-Oak Lee Buzzfeed Sep 2014 20min Permalink
A day after swimming in an Arkansas water park, Kali Harding was diagnosed with a brain-eating amoeba that kills 99% of the people infects. This is the story of how she survived.
Peter Andrey Smith Buzzfeed Jul 2014 25min Permalink
Can neuroscience take the pain out of painful memories?
Michael Specter New Yorker May 2014 25min Permalink
Getting clean with a three-day trip.
Previously: The Longform Guide to Addiction.
Abby Haglage The Daily Beast May 2014 30min Permalink
Do jellyfish have minds?
Oliver Sacks New York Review of Books Apr 2014 15min Permalink
Why we love repetition in music.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis Aeon Mar 2014 10min Permalink
A profile of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who has spent the last 30 years trying to replicate the human mind.
James Somers The Atlantic Oct 2013 30min Permalink
What neuroscience is learning from code-breakers and thieves.
Virginia Hughes Nautilus Oct 2013 15min Permalink
“In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? “
Michael Graziano Aeon Aug 2013 15min Permalink
Why your phone may (or may not) be killing you.
Nathaniel Rich Harper's May 2010 Permalink
What fragmented reading experiences do to neural circuitry. (It’s not good.)
Nicholas Carr Wired Jun 2010 10min Permalink
The not-so-underground culture of neuroenhancing drug use, and where it’s headed.
Margaret Talbot New Yorker Apr 2009 40min Permalink