Jon Hamilton

Sigmund Freud thought dreams were all about wish fulfillment and repressed desire. But scientists now think they're linked to memory processing and consciousness. And they're often quite mundane.

In 2003, researchers declared a moratorium on the use of transplanted brain cells to treat Parkinson's disease. Now, armed with better cells, they're giving the approach another try.

People and other primates have an amazing ability to instantly recognize faces. Scientists at Caltech found that we do that by having 205 specialized brain cells divvy up the task.

Sometime between grade school and grad school, the brain's information highways get remapped in a way that dramatically reins in impulsive behavior.

In 1848, a railroad worker survived an accident that drove a 13-pound iron bar through his head. The injury changed his personality, and our understanding of the brain.

Orangutans breast-feed up to nine years, longer than any other primate. That may help offspring survive food shortages. But humans may have gained a survival advantage from weaning earlier.

By measuring fragments of genetic material in saliva, scientists were able to accurately predict whether a young person's concussion symptoms would last days or weeks.

Experiments with small clusters of networked brain cells are helping scientists see how real brains develop normally, and what goes awry when cells have trouble making connections.

Research in epilepsy has found a key to why small pulses of electricity to the brain sometimes help and sometimes hurt a failing memory. Brains hurt by physical trauma or dementia might benefit, too.

When people have dreams, an area near the back of the brain seems to wake up. And specific patterns of brain activity in that area can even reveal what we're dreaming about.

Some modern shoulder-fired weapons produce blast waves powerful enough to rattle the brain. A $30 million study aims to help the military figure out how much blast exposure, over time, is too much.

A spinal injury severed the connection between Bill Kochevar's brain and everything below his shoulders. But technology has given him a new way to control one arm and hand.

More and more doctors are offering ketamine, an anesthetic and club drug, to severely depressed patients who haven't responded to other treatments.

In a preliminary study, the cancer drug nilotinib seemed to help patients with Parkinson's and dementia. Now two larger and more rigorous studies of the drug are under way.

Rocky wowed scientists when he showed he could control his vocal cords much the way people do. His abilities suggest that early humans might have spoken words 10 million years ago.

For decades, scientists suspected that the parasite responsible for river blindness might be causing a rare form of epilepsy. Now they have evidence.

Scientists have created addiction-resistant mice by altering the reward system in their brains. The findings shed light on the biochemistry of addiction.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal's drawings of nerve cells changed scientists' understanding of the brain. Now, 80 of those drawings are going on display at an art museum in Minnesota.

Claims about the size of crowds for both President Trump's inauguration and the protests that followed the day after, are being debated. Scientists struggle with how to do that kind of head count.

When scientists activate hunting circuits in the brains of genetically modified mice, the animals attack insects and even bottle caps as prey. It gives clues to the evolution of hunting in humans.