Here we review two newly published first edition textbooks targeting the undergraduate cognitive neuroscience market. Principles of Cognitive Neuroscience was written by researchers from Duke University's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognition, Brain and Consciousness was edited by Bernard Baars and Nicole Gage.

Your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it, according to researchers. By looking at brain activity while making a decision, the researchers could predict what choice people would make before they themselves were even aware of having made a decision.

The use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by both ill and healthy individuals raises ethical questions that should not be ignored, argue Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir.

t's a classic cocktail party conundrum: How do our brains decide where we should train our attention when people are milling all about us chatting away—some to us, some to others? In an attempt to find out, researchers at Stanford University and McGill University in Montreal scanned the brains of 18 subjects who were listening to classical music by 18th-century British composer William Boyce.

Between the ages of one and two, toddlers typically rapidly expand their vocabularies. Tots seem to suddenly go from babbling hesitantly to confidently chatting up a storm. But it turns out the leap from mama to precocious follows a simple mathematical pattern: the bell curve.

The way that people talk about 'high' and 'low' notes makes it sound as though musical pitch has something to do with physical location. Now it seems there may be a reason for this: the same bit of our brain could control both our understanding of pitch and spatial orientation. The result comes from a study of tone-deaf people — also known as 'amusics' — which shows that they have poorer spatial skills than those who have no problem distinguishing between two musical notes.

Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar.

The existence of robust and reliable sex differences in brain regions relevant to the control of reproduction cannot be refuted. However, my research group spent a year of frustration trying to apply the same principles to putative sex differences in cognition. This ended with the epiphany that even the standard laboratory rat shows few, if any, sex differences in the morphometry of regions relevant to cognition such as the hippocampus, and that the learning ability of both sexes is essentially the same.

A note to the forgetful: be thankful you don’t remember everything. It means your brain is working properly. According to a new study, the brain only chooses to remember memories it thinks are most relevant, and actively suppresses those that are similar but less used, helping to lessen the cognitive load and prevent confusion.

You've walked your normal route home a thousand times. Twice, a lurking gang of teenagers jeered as you went by. Most people would see the threat of attack on any day for what it is — minimal. But a few would be too scared to risk the journey alone ever again. Such over-anxious people tend to interpret a potentially dangerous situation as intolerably threatening, even when the risk is tiny. Researchers have now uncovered the neural circuits behind this inappropriate behaviour — at least in mice.