Long-form essays exploring what minds are capable of when given clarity, time and care.
Cells have an emergency system for damaged proteins. It is governed by a single transcription factor, HSF1, and it stops responding properly with age — which is one reason misfolded proteins accumulate in ageing brains.
Losing hearing raises the risk of dementia. So does losing vision. Losing both raises it by considerably more than either alone — and by more than the two added together would suggest.
Hearing loss is the single largest modifiable risk factor for dementia in the Lancet Commission's accounting. The obvious question is whether treating it helps.
Air pollution appears on most lists of modifiable dementia risk factors, usually without a number attached. The 2023 meta-analysis in the BMJ supplies the numbers, and they are smaller and less certain than the prominence of the claim suggests.
Ask what makes the human brain special and you will be told it has a hundred billion neurons and ten times as many glial cells, a neocortex three times larger than predicted, and more white matter than expected. Most of that is either unsourced or wrong.
The human brain is two per cent of body mass and consumes about twenty per cent of the body's energy budget. That ratio is quoted constantly and almost never unpacked, which is a shame, because the reason behind it is more interesting than the number.
The claim that heavy media multitasking damages attention and memory circulates widely and is usually supported by little more than intuition. In 2020 a study in Nature put numbers on it, and the numbers are smaller and more interesting than the headlines.
Two people can have the same amount of brain pathology and only one of them shows symptoms. That observation, made repeatedly in autopsy studies, is the reason the concept of cognitive reserve exists.
People have been running experiments on their own brains without supervision for as long as the equipment has been cheap enough. What has changed is that the equipment is now very cheap, the forums are large, and some of the techniques have become legitimate research programmes.