Not too long ago, a Kickstarter for lucid dreaming goggles started getting passed around the Internet. At $80 a pair, though, they’re a little bit expensive, so why not make your own lucid dreaming goggles on the cheap? It’s not very hard, as it turns out. Pretty much all you need to do is hook some LEDs to a pair of goggles, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The means by which traces of memory are stored, engrams, have only been hypothetical, which means we did not have an idea of the actual, concrete means by which memories are stored in the brain. However, in a new study, MIT researchers used optogenics — a combination of optical and genetic methods to control events in cells of living tissue, essentially the manipulation of cells so they’re sensitive and responsive to light — to show that memories are actually kept inside brain cells.

Are you wondering where in Australia to continue your education? Are you worried about the potential dangers of magical finger-snapping teleportation? Then this video, which may or may not be endorsed by the institute for higher eduction which it features, is for you! Just more proof that Australians are making some fantastic advertisements. Watch out, things do get a bit gory in this video.

If you break your arm, especially your dominant one, you’ve got some serious compensating to do. For a few weeks at least, you’re going to have to start learning to be ambidextrous to do all kinds of important things like writing, using your phone, using a computer and, um, other stuff too. Of course, once you’re all fixed up, you can go back to normal, but that brief stint actually rewires your brain according to a new study published in Neurology.

If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly looking for new ways to tap into your distilled reserves of video game nostaliga. Mapstalgia, a thriving new Tumblr that popped up a few days ago, seems to be the perfect, unusual-but-effective way to do that. It’s my nostalgia drug of the morning. The premise is simple: People draw video game maps from memory, but somehow the result is so much more than that.

Everybody knows that diet and exercise is a great way to try to maintain the ever-more fragile facade of youth as you barrel towards a slow but inevitable decline, but did you know that diet can actually help keep your brain from aging? Neither did anyone else until researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome found that the molecule CREB1, spurred into action by a strict diet, activates a whole bunch of genes that add to the longevity of that big ol’ hunk of meat.

Hallucinating color is not just a great name for your indie rock band’s next record, but also something certain “highly suggestible” people have been proven to do. While gazing deep into a monochrome pattern, a group of test subjects — first under hypnosis, and then not — reported being able to see colors in the designs, colors that were not actually there. It turns out that being “highly suggestible” does not just mean that you can be easily convinced that those are not, in fact, the droids you are looking for, it also means that you may have the ability to self-hypnotize and consciously affect your perceptions.

The only thing more mind-blowing than what’s going on inside your head when you experience déjà vu, presque vu, or jamais vu.This video is a bit on the long side, but it is completely worth your time. That’s the great thing about learning how your brain works, it changes how you look at everything.

There’s a pretty common misconception that IQ is something that is innate, or even that it’s something established early on in life and then doesn’t change. There’s also the common misconception that IQ is a consistent, established, and testable unit of measurement, but that’s a whole different can of worms. Cathy Price of University College London and her team conducted a study to try and dig into the real story behind IQ. What they found was that, however you measure it, it’s a number that’s in flux well into the teenage years.

The study involved testing 33 teenagers between the ages of 12-14 in 2004 and the same 33 again in 2008 when they were 16-20. Along side standard IQ tests measuring verbal and non-verbal intelligence, the researchers took MRI images of the kids’ brains during the tests in order to get deeper results. What they found was that the teens could drop or rise up 20 points, and not just in a specific area, but in all areas or any combination thereof.

Thanks to research by Professor Jack Gallant and a crack team of researchers at UC Berkeley, we are now one step closer to using our brains to record and store actual visual media. When we see things (or think about things for that matter), our brains naturally activate in very specific ways considering what we’re seeing or imagining. Gallant’s most recent paper in Current Biology outlines the results of an experiment that tried to decode brain activity and convert it back into video. It’s astounding how well it worked.

The experiment went a little something like this. Subjects were placed in an MRI and watched a series of movie trailers. While they watched, the MRI tracked the blood flow to certain parts of the brain and a computer parsed these parts of the brain into voxels (volumetric pixels). The first round of trailer-viewing gave the computer a chance to get a feel for the way the sections of the brain should be mapped. Its results were then compared against the actual trailers to try and match the voxels of activity with the footage that created them, a calibration round of sorts.