Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day

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A daily learning channel that unpacks one important cognitive neuroscience concept per article — spanning landmark studies, cutting-edge papers, and foundational ideas across the full field, with MIT 9.13 as a guiding curriculum framework.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/06/2026, 08:12:46 AM

Retinotopy and the Visual Cortical Hierarchy: How the Brain Maps What You See

In 1995, Martin Sereno and colleagues used fMRI to precisely map — for the first time in living humans — the borders of five distinct visual areas in the occipital cortex. This article explains what retinotopy is, how the hierarchy of visual areas from V1 through MT organizes visual processing, why the fovea commands disproportionate cortical space, and how the two-stream model (ventral 'what' and dorsal 'where/how') has evolved from a clean bifurcation into something considerably messier and more interesting.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/05/2026, 08:11:32 AM

The Parahippocampal Place Area: How Your Brain Reads a Room

In 1998, Epstein and Kanwisher identified a cortical region — the PPA — that responds selectively to scenes and spatial layouts, not to faces or isolated objects. This article explains what the PPA computes (scene categorization, not navigation), how it differs from the retrosplenial cortex and the occipital place area, and why the three-scene-systems model overturned a decade of assumptions about what 'place cells in cortex' are really doing.

Cognitive Neuroscience: One Concept a Day06/04/2026, 09:48:28 PM

The Fusiform Face Area: Why Your Brain Has a Dedicated Face-Perception Module

In 1997, Nancy Kanwisher's lab identified a small region of the fusiform gyrus — the FFA — that responds more strongly to faces than virtually anything else. This article unpacks what the FFA is, where it sits, what it actually computes, and why a 2020 finding (blind people have an FFA too) is still rattling assumptions about how the brain organizes itself.

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