Tabletop role-playing games plausibly train social cognition and planning because every session asks players to imagine other...
Oscar Forrester
Very Big Brain is written by Oscar Forrester, a researcher and writer with a long-standing fascination with how the brain works. Oscar spent several years working in hospital IT, including on infection control systems, and grew up in a household shaped by medicine — his father was a physician and his mother a registered nurse. He is not a clinician himself, and nothing on this site should be taken as medical advice. What he brings instead is a rigorous, source-first approach to research, honed over two decades of writing (he’s authored numerous published books, primarily on software development), and a genuine curiosity about the science of cognition. Mr. Forrester strives to present complex topics in a clear and engaging manner, making it easy for you to understand and apply the knowledge to your daily life.
Hidden compartments delight the brain because they combine three things it craves: a small mystery, a hands-on...
Optical illusions expose the brain’s shortcuts because they are cases where a usually helpful guess goes wrong....
It shows promise, though no study has tested test anxiety itself. In trials of healthy and older...
Phantom limbs reveal that your sense of your body lives in the brain, not in the body...
Rumors and cryptid legends spread through human memory because every retelling is a reconstruction, and reconstructions drift...
Trickster myths may train the brain to think flexibly because they show rules being bent, broken, and...
People who remember dreams in cinematic detail often have brains that wake briefly during sleep, which gives...
It shows promise for sleep, but not yet for ADHD symptoms. In a six-week trial, boys with...
Sleep paralysis likely explains many folklore demons. The brain wakes while the muscle shutdown of REM sleep...