New Scientist - The Essential Guides

The Essential Guide series brings together the best recent coverage from New Scientist specially curated into beautiful compendiums about the most exciting themes in science and technology today. Written and edited by some of the world’s best science writers, these guides will leave you with everything you need to know about subjects from nutrition to the solar system and more.

NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDE THE HUMAN BRAIN

New Scientist - The Essential Guides

BRAIN BASICS

ONE BRAIN, MANY PARTS • The brain’s 86 billion neurons make up a jelly-like mass of pinkish tissue weighing in at around 1.5 kilograms. This complex organ is far more than the sum of its many parts. To begin to understand how it creates thoughts, memories and emotions, it helps to begin by breaking the brain down.

LEFT OR RIGHT BRAIN

THE ROLE OF THE CEREBELLUM • The Latin word “cerebellum” means “little brain”. We used to think that this small area of the hindbrain controlled only movement. But the latest thinking suggests it plays a much larger role, being involved in everything from planning to social interactions.

BRAIN-IMAGING TECHNIQUES • Thanks to advances in technology in recent decades, scientists can now peer inside the brain as it goes about the business of thinking, feeling and understanding the world.

HOW NEURONS WORK • While looking at the overall structure of the brain can reveal a great deal about what happens in there, the devil is very much in the detail. To really understand how the brain works, it requires going down to the level of the individual brain cells – chief among them the neurons – and how they are connected to each other.

SOCIAL SUPERHIGHWAYS

THE BRAIN’S WIRING DIAGRAM • A map of the brain’s wiring would help us to understand how electrical activity in a mass of connected cells adds up to the complexities of human experience. The problem is that it is complicated. In recent years, neuroscientists have added advanced mathematics to their toolkit to start to reveal the basics of how it works.

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OUR CHANGING BRAINS

THE BRAIN BEFORE BIRTH • By the time we take our first breath, our brains are more than eight months old. They have already begun a remarkable lifelong journey of learning and adaptation.

INSIDE THE MIND OF A CHILD • Childhood is arguably the brain’s most important period of development. During more than a decade of rapid growth and learning, every experience contributes to the person a child will ultimately become.

TRAVAILS OF TEENAGERS • Teenagers can sometimes be selfish, reckless, irritable and irrational – like the average human, only more so. Given the cacophony of construction going on inside the adolescent brain, that is no wonder.

THE ADULT BRAIN • The brain is a “use-it-or-lose-it” organ. All the evidence suggests that adulthood is the time to guard your brain’s health with your life, to maximise your chances of a happy and healthy old age.

BABY BRAIN AND MENOPAUSE MIND

EFFECTS OF OLD AGE • By 65, most people will start to notice the signs of brain ageing: you forget people’s names and the teapot occasionally turns up in the fridge. But as compensation, the old adage that age brings wisdom has more than a grain of truth in it.

THE TRUTH ABOUT MALE AND FEMALE BRAINS • Stereotypes of how biological sex influences ability and behaviour abound – but the latest research is exploding the myth of male and female brains, says researcher Gina Rippon

MYSTERIES OF MEMORY

WHAT ARE MEMORIES MADE OF? • Survival depends on learning from what has gone before. That requires a mechanism for storing important experiences in memory, so that what doesn’t kill you makes you wiser. But the processes that underlie memory...