Consciousness and the Brain

The nuts and bolts underlying human action.
by Ezequiel Morsella

How Thought Influences Action

New technologies (e.g., brain-computer interfaces) reveal how thoughts influence action. Read More

What Is a Thought?

Through mental rotation, 3 + V equals a heart. Read More

How Do 3 Pounds of Brain Tissue Generate Our Consciousness?

How the brain generates conscious experience is one of the greatest mysteries in science. One approach is based on looking at what the brain may not need for consciousness. Read More

Are We Aware of What We Do? The Answer Is Yes and No

It seems that, while speaking, one is aware of what one has just uttered, and that one has a general inkling regarding what one intends to say, but that one is often unaware of the exact words that will be selected by our brains when trying to convey some information. Read More

Do we use only 10 percent of our brain?

Is it true that we use so little of our brain, or is this a misinterpretation of classic findings in neuroscience? Read More

Living Below the JND (the "Just Noticeable Difference"): Psychophysics in Everyday Life

How to live below the JND: One's iPod is based on psychophysics research Read More

"The history of psychology/neuroscience" equals "the data set of psychology/neuroscience"

To appreciate all the data about a given subject regarding the mind/brain, one must travel down the memory lane of the history of psychology and neuroscience Read More

Freud's Unconscious Was Not A Subliminal One

Unconscious processing is more prevalent than some researchers realize, especially when one doesn't equate 'the unconscious' with just the processing of subliminal stimuli Read More

Classical Conditioning in Everyday Life

Why do plastic-looking cakes look tasty?  Pavlov had the answer. Read More

On the Film Inception: Observations about Dreams and in Dreams

Inception brings the audience's attention to the mysterious underpinnings of the dreamworld, a magnificent creation of the brain. Even more startling is the observation that, scientifically, waking life is just as mysterious a 'creation.' Read More

The Deepest Mysteries of the Mind-Brain: A Matter of Scale?

Just as our toy models of the solar system are 'missing something' and cannot instantiate strong gravitational fields (and make the plastic sun attract the plastic planets), our intuitive models of how the brain works (based on 'slow' everyday experience) exist at a scale in which some phenomena (e.g., basic consciousness) are unlikely to emerge. Read More

The Unconscious Doer

One is surprised when first learning that most of the sophisticated and intelligent processes in the brain are unconscious. In action production, the heavy lifting is done by unconscious processes. Read More

Consciousness: The Brain's Wifi System

Consciousness functions like the brain's wifi system to integrate processes that would otherwise be independent.

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Perception: More than Meets the Eye

Why water tastes good but hydrogen-peroxide doesn't reveals the nature in which we represent the world out there. Our conscious life is a creation, like 'The Matrix,' but unlike The Matrix, it is a creation that is good for our survival. Read More

Don't Catch a Lizard by the Tail

How the unintelligent and unconscious cells in a wiggling, detached lizard tail can ever give rise to our intelligent, conscious mind is one of the greatest mysteries in science. Read More

Ezequiel Morsella

Ezequiel Morsella, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Social Cognitive Neuroscience at San Francisco State University and an Assistant Adjunct Professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.

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Books by Ezequiel Morsella, Ph.D.

Image of Oxford Handbook of Human Action (Social Cognition & Social Neuroscience)
Oxford Handbook of Human Action (Social Cognition & Social Neuroscience)
Image of Expressing Oneself / Expressing One's Self: Communication, Cognition, Language, and Identity
Expressing Oneself / Expressing One's Self: Communication, Cognition, Language, and Identity