Why Trauma Can Change Your Sense of Time

A biological look at why a past event can feel neurologically present — tracing how episodic memory fragments, bodily signals become conditioned alarms, and the brain loses its grip on when.

The Brain’s Executive Office: What the Prefrontal Cortex Actually Does All Day

The prefrontal cortex coordinates working memory, inhibitory control, planning, and emotional regulation through a collection of distinct subregions working together. Understanding what this system actually does — and what makes it fail — gives a more precise account of what focus, self-control, and clear thinking depend on.

The Brain After a Frightening Event: Why Some Memories Fade and Others Won’t Let Go

After something frightening ends, why do some memories fade while others keep returning with full force? Research on the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex is mapping the circuit that determines which memories persist — and why the answer has less to do with forgetting than with which competing neural population is currently in control.

Why Some People Feel Everything: The Neuroscience of Sensory Sensitivity

The brain does not receive sensory information passively. It actively filters and weights every incoming signal — and the architecture of that filtering system varies measurably from person to person. For roughly one in six people, the circuits responsible for sensory gating assign higher priority to signals that most nervous systems quietly suppress.

Why Children Borrow Their Parents’ Nervous Systems

Before a child can regulate their own nervous system, they borrow regulation from a caregiver. Research in developmental neuroscience is mapping how that process works — through facial expression, voice, and moment-to-moment physiological synchrony — and what happens when the signal is disrupted.

When PTSD and Concussion Overlap: What Can the Brain Tell Us?

For decades, medicine filed post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury in separate folders. Neuroimaging research is showing why that filing system was never quite right — and what the overlap between these two conditions actually looks like at the circuit level.