Andres Breivik, the 32-year-old Norwegian man who killed 77 people and injured 151 others in July, was declared insane by state psychiatrists in Oslo on Tuesday. After planting a car bomb near government buildings in Oslo that killed eight people on July 22, Breivik drove to a political youth camp on Utoeya island and gunned down 69 people, many of whom were teens. In an online manifesto that was found later, Breivik claimed to be defending Europe from an Islamic invasion enabled by Norway's Labour Party and the European Union. Alexander Levi, a lawyer in Oslo, discusses the likelihood of Breivik facing a prison sentence after being declared insane.

For Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, the idea of being a human-cyborg isn't just something of science fiction books, but a real world possibility. Ritaccio was born without his right hand, and through his work, as the director of the Epilepsy and Human Brain Mapping Program at the Albany Medical Center and J. Spencer Standish Professor of Neurology at the Albany Medical College, he has learned to map intentions of the human brain. In his lab, Ritaccio is mapping out the electrical layout of the brain, in hopes of building interactions that will one day change the lives of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities.

We’re going to take a bit of a risk today, and try to explain the science of something extremely visual in a primarily auditory medium. We’re going to talk about magic, why sleight-of-hand works, and what it says about how our brains function. Warning: magic spoilers ahead!

In the past, athletes involved in high-impact sports such as boxing or football would refer to the periods their brains went dim as "punch drunk." They'd find themselves thinking slowly, forgetting directions, suffering headaches. Now researchers think the symptoms may be indicative of a greater problem: the rare disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Athletes may not be the only victims— soldiers are also vulnerable. Joining The Takeaway with more is Chris Nowinski, director of the Sports Legacy Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit that has partnered with Boston University to study the long term affects of brain injuries like concussions on athletes and soldiers.

Read more about the repercussions of brain injuries in today's New York Times article, A Chance for Clues to Brain Injury in Combat Blasts.

Teenagers send thousands upon thousands of text messages each month (some as many as 24,000!). So researchers are beginning to wonder: what’s the effect of the furious finger work? Reporter Katie Hafner joins The Takeaway with answers.

For more, read Katie's piece on texting and teens in the Science Times section of today's New York Times, Texting may be taking a toll.

New scientific research suggests that the mind of a baby is a humming, buzzing, supercharged learning machine, capable of taking in and processing enormous amounts of information. Now that we know this, how should we interact with babies and support their developing minds? We talk to our science contributor Jonah Lehrer. He is the author of Proust was a Neuroscientist. He latest book is How We Decide.

Although there is no calculator that can compute our national attention deficit, it is clear there are too many stimuli competing for our precious brain time. In a world where the temptations to twitter and text are 24/7, is there hope for our multi-tasked minds? Writer Winifred Gallagher says yes. In her new book, Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Gallagher reviews the latest developments in the psychology and neuroscience of attention. She joins us in our studio to discuss the benefits of training yourself to focus.

Duped. Tricked. Hornswoggled. Deceived. How can you tell if someone is fooling you? According to a new article out in today's Science Times, it's all in how they tell the story. The new focus on interview content grows in part out of a frustration with previous methods that studied behavior — averted eyes, fidgeting, or sweating—and a lack in helpful technological advances. The more important point: How much detail does someone give you when they tell their story? Joining The Takeaway with more on this story is New York Times science reporter Benedict Carey. Listen in, and then try the technique out on a con-artist (or first date) near you.

Benedict Carey's article is part of the Science Times' special Forensics section. Read his article, "Judging Honesty By Words, Not Fidgets," and check out the rest of The New Forensics issue.

Also, if lying appeals to you, listen to Radio Lab's show on Deception.

Beating a polygraph test may not get you in the clear if you're lying. But just in case, watch this video for pointers.

Bullying causes more than tears, according to new research. Scientists reporting in the May issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry say that childhood bullying can lead to teenage psychotic episodes such as delusions and paranoia. Here to tell us more is study co-author Dieter Wolke, a professor of developmental psychology and individual differences at the University of Warwick, England.

To read the study for yourself, click here. To help someone you know is being bullied, check out the website Stop Bullying Now. Are you a target of workplace bullying? Here are some tips to stop bullying at work. For more on why bullies feel the need to target people, read Why Bullies Bully.

For more on the effects that childhood trauma has on our biological development, listen to The Takeaway's February 2009 conversation with Michael Meaney, Keep your hands to yourself: Child abuse affects our genes.

The world is now spending billions of dollars investigating the causes of climate change. Scientists are quickly putting together physical and biological experiments and projects, hoping for solutions and models that will show us how to slow warming and save the planet. But there's another body of work underway that's focused on the human brain. This research argues that climate change policy and solutions for global warming won't be worth much until we know how to influence the individual decisions that cause global warming. To help us figure out why it is so hard to get our brains to choose green options we are joined by Jon Gertner, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His article on this will be available in the Times Magazine on Sunday.

Maybe this is a case for Captain Planet:

When we drag our nails across a chalkboard, it's not pleasant. But dragging our nails across our skin often provides us nothing but relief from a prickly, tickly sensation know as The Itch. Just what is it about scratching an itch that causes the itchy sensation to go away? New research out this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience provides an answer. And we're itchin' to tell you about it: Glenn Geisler, one of the scientists involved with the work, joins The Takeaway with more.

Read Geisler's Nature Neuroscience paper here .

And have you ever wondered how deep into the skin a person can scratch? Read Atul Gawande's New Yorker article The Itch to find out. We won't spoil the ending for you, but it's pretty darn deep.

Ants do it. (says E.O. Wilson)
Octopuses do it.
Humans...mmmm, not so much.

There's talk going around about the science of P-L-A-Y, and specifically, about what play means, how it lights up our brains, and why we feel like automatrons when we don't play. Today's prescription is written by Dr Stuart Brown, co-author of the new book, "Play," and founder of the National Institute for Play. He joins The Takeaway for a break from the real world.

Talk about turning a notion on its head. What if your coveted winter vacation—the time when you leave the bitter, snowy cold behind and head for a few days of palm trees—could actually add to your winter blues? New research in psychology shows that interruptions from things we dislike may make us detest them all the more, whereas interruptions from doing something we really adore say, watching an episode of Friday Night Lights may highlight our appreciation. Benedict Carey, a science reporter from the New York Times, joins The Takeaway to explain.

Read his story on the dreaded commercial break Liked the Show? Maybe It Was the Commercials in today's New York Times.

It seems like there are two kinds of people: the ones who agonize over every decision and the ones who go with their gut. There’s the guy on line at the coffee house who takes ten minutes to decide on a latte and there’s the pilot who makes a split second decision to land a plane in the Hudson River. Neuroscientist Jonah Lehrer is the author of the new book, How We Decide, which explores what goes on in the brain when we make a decision.