The Mind

Finland’s bold push to change the heart health of a nation

Beginning in its bleak borderlands, the country launched an official — and broadly influential — effort to improve food and lifestyle choices, using everything from cozy fireside chats and reality TV shows to laws and incentives.

By Emily Willingham

Photo shows a woman smiling while doing meditation with others. Staying cheerful can be protective against stress and some illnesses.

Health & Disease

Always look on the bright side of life

How a positive outlook may buffer us from stress and ward off health problems

Photograph of a man walking on a wooden jetty at the water, under cloudy skies. Despair-induced suicidal thoughts and actual attempts are recognized as distinct things by researchers, who are working to better understand the progression and so intervene more effectively.

The Mind

Short-circuiting the suicide cascade

Psychologists are seeking better ways to cut the link between dire thoughts and fatal action. Among their strategies: individualized plans for pulling back from the brink, and limiting access to deadly means, especially guns.

Animated illustration shows a golden key turning a switch inside the brain of a woman feeling despair. The key opens her eyes to a beautiful vista – a golden shoreline glistening in the sun. Ketamine is helping people with suicidal depression to feel better.

The Mind

Listening to ketamine

The fast-acting drug offers a new way to treat depression and fathom its origins. Recent approval of a nasal spray promises to expand access, but much remains unknown about long-term use and the potential for abuse.

Society

Nudging grows up (and now has a government job)

Ten years after an influential book proposed ways to work with — not against — the irrationalities of human decision-making, practitioners have refined and broadened this gentle tool of persuasion

Artwork showing neurons along with the tangles of tau protein and clumps of amyloid-beta plaques that are typically found in the brains of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Investigating when and how these proteins form might lead to new therapies.

Health & Disease

Watching Alzheimer’s in action

A look inside the brains of engineered mice suggests therapies might need to target two key proteins — tau and amyloid-beta — at the same time

A conceptual illustration with the message that the causes of autism are many. This variety in genetic and environmental triggers may help explain why the condition itself is so variable.

Health & Disease

The quest for autism’s causes, and what it reveals about all of us

The more researchers look, the more multifaceted the risk factors appear — and the more we learn about how the brain works and develops

Cartoon shows many people talking. No other animals have developed spoken language.

The Mind

Why speech is a human innovation

Many animals have the equipment for spoken language, but only people have all the right neural connections

The Mind

Rebranding placebos

Harnessing the power of sham therapies for real healing might require a new lexicon

Collage shows various images representing financial decisions faced by retired people, dollars for saving, making a will, a house, long-term care for the elderly, dealing with unexpected medical expenses.

Society

The inheritance enigma

Retirement is a time for spending, not saving. And yet many people hold on to their wealth. Understanding why, and where that money ends up, is of increasing importance as the US population ages.

Society

The power of brands, conscious and unconscious

Economists explore the complex forces that shape what ends up in your shopping cart and how that might change in the online marketplace

Conceptual art showing brain with two targeted areas being affected by ultrasound waves. Using the tools of sonogenetics, focused ultrasound beams can deliver drugs or gene therapy to targets in the brain with millimeter precision.

Technology

Sounding out the brain

Ultrasound isn’t just for images. Sonogenetics and other promising technologies let researchers use focused sound waves to control genes and entire cells deep in the tissues of living animals, without surgery.

Illustration of the brain’s information storage system as a brain-shaped set of filling cabinets that store memories. Some pieces of paper are falling out of the cabinets, representing how we forget memories. Emerging views see forgetting as an active process of an efficient brain designed to make good decisions.

The Mind

Why forgetting may make your mind more efficient

Evidence builds for ways that the brain actively erases memories

Image of a graspable haptic device, called Foldaway, that is the size of a drink coaster when flat, making it conveniently portable. The user places a joystick where the three hinged arms meet, and the arms offer resistance, to give a sense of the objects being manipulated.

Technology

Reaching out to touch virtual reality

New technologies mean we won’t just see and hear digital information. We’ll also feel it.

Microscopic image shows a false-colored section of the mouse hippocampus, highlighting the buildup of cellular waste that characterizes juvenile Batten disease, a rare genetic disorder.

Living World

When the brain’s waste disposal system fails

Marco Sardiello explains how problems with the cell’s lysosomes lead to disease

Photograph of human and robotic arms shaking hands. Scientists are devising ways for people with paralysis to control computers, robotic prosthetics and even their own limbs with their thoughts.

Technology

Bypassing paralysis

By decoding brain activity with electrical implants, computers can help disabled people move a robotic arm — or their own

Conceptual illustration of a brain reacting to many languages being spoken. Speaking more than one language may boost brain function as well as gray and white matter, and possibly preserve the aging brain

The Mind

How a second language can boost the brain

Being bilingual benefits children as they learn to speak — and adults as they age

Computer-generated image that maps the many and diverse neural connections between the cortex and thalamus in a mouse.

The Mind

A long-overlooked brain region may be key to complex thought

The thalamus has traditionally been viewed just as the brain’s sensory relay station. But it may also play an important role in higher-level cognition, MIT’s Michael Halassa explains in a Q&A.

Photo shows a colony of ants on a white background. The workers are each painted individually with different colors of paint droplets. Larvae and a larger queen are also visible.

Living World

The mind of an anthill

Can we use the tools of psychology to understand how colonies of social insects make decisions?

A cartoon representing a stressed person shows a finger about to hit the panic button.

Health & Disease

Top 10 secrets about stress and health

The strain of life — from everyday conflicts to major losses — can stretch our well-being to the breaking point. Here’s what scientists know, and still don’t know, about the stress-illness connection.

Photograph of derelict houses in Philadelphia

Society

Fighting urban violence, one empty lot at a time

Could cleaning up neighborhoods make cities safer? Researchers are looking at novel, inexpensive solutions to crime that everyone can agree on.