We are always listening to our own silent thoughts, but we never think of those thoughts having a sound we could actually hear. Apostolos Georgopoulos is a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota who has come up with a way to translate the electrical activity of the ...

Kurt talks to David Freedberg about what mirror neurons do for us when we look at art. Freedberg is an art historian at Columbia University, but much of his work in recent years has focused on the connection between art and neuroscience.

Janna Levin spends her days chasing down the mysteries of the universe, like chaos theory and black holes. And to take a break from the awesome responsibility of mapping the universe, she makes stuff up -- not as a scientist, but as a novelist. Her first novel ...

People often depict scientists as coldly rational. Physicist Michael Salamon, who works at NASA's Universe Division, takes issue with that. He explains why Walt Whitman misunderstood the beauty of the universe, and why Maxwell's Equations are like a sexual experience. Produced by Lu Olkowski.

Right-brained people are supposed to be artistic and spontaneous, while left-brainers are literal and analytical; in other words, Captain Kirk and Spock. This ubiquitous bit of pop science wisdom came out of Nobel Prize-winning neurology, and it spawned the bestseller Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. But does ...

In the official Hollywood template, you pretty much can't be a genius without also being nuts. Is there a connection between great creativity and mental illness? Tamar Brott speaks with Kaye Redfield Jamison and other psychiatrists to separate the truth from the myth.

Did you ever wonder who decides the color of your shampoo bottle? As part of our on-going series about creativity and science, Lu Olkowski talks with a polymer chemist who creates pigment formulas for plastics at the Engelhard Corporation.

As part of Studio 360's series on science and creativity, Sarah Lilley talks with scientists who admire the impressionist painter Claude Monet not just for his color choices, but for his ability to trick the human eye and brain.

How do you convey the millions of years over which a species evolves in the span of a museum tour? Sarah Lilley looks at an exhibit on Charles Darwin that lets the science speak for itself.

Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall believes there are more dimensions to space - possibly 13 more -- than the three we experience. She's faced the challenge of describing a world that no one can see. Produced by Sarah Lilley.

Artist Clifford Ross was disappointed with the pictures he took on vacation. So he built a new kind of camera with resolution years ahead of digital photography -- and he may have reinvented how we look at pictures. Produced by Andrew Adam Newman.

They're not as rare as you might think. In fact, scientists have learned how to grow perfect diamonds in a laboratory. But that hasn't taken the shine off their allure, even for the experts who make them.

Don Ingber is a cell biologist from Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital. One day he saw a piece of modern sculpture and—Eureka!-he was inspired to make a major breakthrough in biology. Lu Olkowski reports on the unlikely epiphany.

Think of just about any product in your house-your TV, radio, microwave, telephone—if Bell Laboratory didn't invent it, they probably perfected it. As part of our on-going series on science and creativity, Michelle Mercer looks back at the little New Jersey lab that changed the world.

Hospital architecture usually stirs up feelings of anxiety and dread—which may not encourage patients to recover quickly, according to several new studies. Jocelyn Gonzales reports on the architects and medical professionals who are designing a new wave of feel-good hospitals, as part of our on-going series on ...

Michael Chorost was born with a severe hearing impairment, the result of a rubella epidemic in the 1960s. He used hearing aids, learned to speak, went to regular schools and got his Ph.D. in English. Then, a few years ago, Michael's residual hearing abruptly gave out. His ...

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit that asked, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Sound artist Jane Philbrick asked a question just as unlikely: "What if retired Senator Jesse Helms could recite a lesbian love poem by Gertrude Stein?" Andrew Adam Newman found out how Philbrick's quixotic project ...

Dr. Dennis Pelli researches how we read, identify shapes, even why we find art compelling. Once a semester he takes a group of students to see a piece of installation art that he believes will teach them how to be better scientific observers. Laura Starecheski tagged along ...

Are supermodels more symmetrical? Beauty expert Kelley Quan joins Kurt and Mario Livio to talk about how symmetry affects human attraction. Quan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the online fashion magazine ZooZOOM.com, and she explains how symmetry -- or the lack of it ...

Trent Wolbe talks with contemporary composer Steve Reich about the various symmetrical techniques that animate the music that inspires him as well as his own works. Produced by Trent Wolbe.