In the brain, justice is served from many parts

sea-maid submitted, created time 3 weeks 3 days (www.sciencenews.org)

Making decisions about crime and punishment is, it turns out, as complicated as a legal brief. For the first time, scientists have peered into the brains of people who are deciding whether a crime deserves punishment and how severe the penalty should be.

Those decisions involve parts of the brain associated with rational thought, but emotion-processing regions weigh in too, a team of law and neuroscience researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., show in a new study in the Dec. 11 Neuron

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Animal Intelligence and the Evolution of the Human Mind

jerry submitted, created time 4 months 1 week (www.sciam.com)

The human brain lacks conspicuous characteristics—such as relative or absolute size—that might account for humans’ superior intellect. This article in Scientific American is a smoothly written and interesting discussion of how scientists have found ways to measure intelligence in non-human species--especially primates--and of the speculation on the reasons behind human intelligence.

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decisions are made before you even know it

jane2007 submitted, created time 8 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

According to researchers, your brain makes up its mind up to ten seconds before you realize it.

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