By Henry Taylor & The Conversation US You know that feeling when you walk into a room and immediately forget why you came in? Maybe you were there to fetch your keys. On your way to the room, you were thinking about grabbing your keys. But once you arrive, your keys have completely disappeared from your mind. This is sometimes known as the doorway effect, since it often strikes when you walk into a new room. Why does it happen? The answer has a lot to do with a faculty called working memory. Information gets stored in working memory when we need it for the tasks that we are engaged in right now (like remembering to grab your keys). What makes working memory so intriguing is its close link to consciousness. The doorway effect suggests that when information is removed from working memory, it immediately seems to leave consciousness. It also suggests that it is easy for information in working memory to be forgotten. The link between working memory and consciousness is getting increasing attention in psychology, philosophy and neuroscience. Could working memory somehow give rise to consciousness? In my new book, I explore the complex relationship between the two. Working memory: both rich and poor To understand the doorway effect, we’ll need to know a bit about working memory. One thing that makes working memory so special is that it’s so rich, both in terms of the information it has access to, and its processing power. According to recent models of working memory, it can draw information from sensory channels (vision, touch, smell etc), as well as from other memory systems such as long-term memory and also the brain’s system for processing language. In other words, working memory is where a lot of the information in your brain comes together. Once working memory has that information, there’s a lot it can do with it. Inside working memory are a host of different smaller systems for specific tasks, including visual and spatial reasoning (like solving a Rubik’s cube) and storing chunks of information (like a phone number). There’s even a “central executive” system (my favorite). The executive is like a merciless boss, assigning tasks to the different systems within working memory and keeping everything under control. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Keyword: Consciousness; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30309 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Jake Currie Memory loss is by far the most notorious symptom of Alzheimer’s disease, but it might not be the initial sign of the illness. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, there’s an even earlier tell—impaired cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility is one of the brain’s executive functions governing our ability to switch between different tasks, adapt to novel situations, learn new rules, and so on. To study changes in this vital function, neuroscientists at Texas A&M University used mice genetically engineered to produce the amyloid-beta plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease (5xFAD mice). The team conditioned the mice to learn that a particular action (pulling a lever) led to a reward (a delicious food pellet). They then changed the rules to find out how they reacted. Healthy mice had no trouble adapting to the new regime, but the 5xFAD mice struggled, often repeatedly pulling the original lever without receiving a reward. Importantly, these cognitive flexibility problems surfaced earlier than the kinds of memory problems typically associated with Alzheimer’s. “We found that this function was impaired before we could detect deficits in spatial memory,” study author Jun Wang said in a statement. Taking a closer look into the 5xFAD mice brains, the researchers discovered abnormally high levels of neuroactivity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in decision-making and behavioral flexibility. Previous research has shown this kind of hyperactivity can lead to amyloid-beta plaques piling up, which in turn makes neurons even more excitable. It basically leads to a positive feedback loop.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Attention
Link ID: 30307 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Aimee Cunningham Reassuring evidence on acetaminophen’s safety during pregnancy keeps growing. A large, two-decade study in Hong Kong is the latest to find no link between use of the drug — known as Tylenol in the United States — and a risk of autism or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children. The lack of an association persisted no matter the trimester the drug was prescribed, the dose or the recommended frequency, researchers report June 29 in JAMA Internal Medicine. Joining several other analyses, including ones conducted in Sweden and Japan, the research adds to the body of evidence reporting no association between acetaminophen use in pregnancy and long-term neurodevelopmental disorders in children. All the studies compared siblings born to mothers who had taken the drug at some point, such that some siblings were exposed to the drug in utero and others weren’t. This approach accounts for the fact that both ADHD and autism are largely influenced by genetics. If acetaminophen were also a factor, researchers would expect a difference between siblings exposed to the drug and those not. None of the studies have found one. For the new study, the researchers pored over electronic health records from 2001 to 2023 for more than 700,000 pairs of mothers and children. Around 43 percent of the kids encountered acetaminophen in utero. The team focused on pairs of siblings that differed in exposure and used their records to follow the children for at least two years for autism diagnoses and at least five for ADHD. The autism analysis included more than 124,000 children, while the ADHD component had more than 97,000. Going a step further, the analysis also looked at the timing and amount of acetaminophen that was prescribed. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: ADHD; Autism
Link ID: 30303 - Posted: 07.01.2026

By Jennie Erin Smith Like a stadium full of sports fans doing the wave, neurons coordinate their electrical signals in rhythmic patterns that sweep across the cortex, the brain’s outermost layer. Recent studies in humans and animals have shown these patterns, called traveling waves, can take on complex shapes, among them a rotating spiral that has been observed during deep sleep, memory retrieval, and other brain processes. A new study has now captured the fast-spinning waves spanning whole brains, offering clues to how they’re organized and what they might do. The study, published today in Science, examined the brains of mice using multiple recording and imaging methods to reveal brainwide patterns that unite disparate regions from the cortex to the deep brain. The research suggests rotating waves have a key role in coordinating the flow of information across the brain to support perception and behavior. It also offers an explanation for the waves’ spiral pattern by showing that they move along a circular path laid by axons—the long projections of neurons. “This is very exciting work,” says neuroscientist Earl Miller of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose team recently reported that rotating waves in the prefrontal cortex appeared to help monkeys regain their focus after a distraction. The new paper shows the waves are “highly organized across the [mouse] cortex and amazingly, across the hemispheres. When you see this kind of organization, it means something fundamental to function.” It’s been hard to see brainwide patterns of rotating waves because most previous studies have captured them with grids of electrodes that sit on the cortex and gauge signals from nearby neurons. Neuroscientists Nick Steinmetz and Zhiwen Ye of the University of Washington got a broader and more precise sense of the waves’ timing and structure by combining two approaches: rapid widefield calcium imaging, which can record the activity of large populations of neurons in the cortex, and Neuropixels probes, ultrathin microelectrodes that can penetrate brain layers, to record deeper regions such as the thalamus and striatum. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Attention
Link ID: 30290 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Kathryn Hulick Emma Lembke joined Instagram at age 12. Soon, she found herself “scrolling mindlessly for hours, addicted to gaining a certain number of likes, a certain number of comments.” She often wanted to stop — but couldn’t. She’s not alone. Most of us these days know the feeling of mindlessly scrolling through low-quality content. We call this sensation “brain rot.” The term can also refer to the content being consumed. Tung Tung Tung Sahur, a personified wooden drum (illustrated above), is one in a slew of silly AI-generated characters deemed “Italian brain rot” because many of them have Italian-sounding names. Trendy among middle schoolers, these absurdist characters show up in memes, videos, Roblox games and more. Brain rot is kind of a joke, but it also really isn’t. A growing number of young people and their parents claim that spending too much time on social media, the spawning ground for brain rot, can mess with mental health. Thousands of cases accusing social media companies of harming young users with addictive features are now making their way through U.S. courts. In May, the U.S. government released a Surgeon General’s warning about the harms of screen use for young people, calling out social media as well as gaming, chatbots and more. “Policy makers and tech companies need to acknowledge the potential for harm and create frameworks to protect children to allow for healthy and joyful use,” states the warning, which includes a disclaimer that the document was edited using the AI tool ChatGPT. But the term “brain rot” evokes something more pernicious. Could browsing through stupid content actually make us stupid? This fear isn’t new. Back in 2009, the former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, voiced concerns about how digital media was impacting young people’s intelligence: “I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information … is in fact affecting cognition,” he said in an interview with talk show host Charlie Rose. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30288 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Lauren Schenkman Many animals can solve novel problems, often in a single go. For humans, that could be writing the first line of a poem, tackling a complex equation or improvising a jazz solo. For a macaque monkey, it might mean climbing a new tree to snag a delectable fruit. A new study, published in May in Nature, adds support to the long-standing idea that the brain accomplishes these feats by piecing together bits of existing knowledge (words, mathematical functions, riffs or tree-climbing moves, for example)—a process called compositional generalization. Single-neuron recordings in macaques locate the knowledge blocks, according to the study. The brain activity patterns that occur in the ventral premotor cortex when monkeys learn to draw simple symbols recur in concert when the animals are later prompted to draw complex shapes made up of those symbols. “We have quite a lot of behavioral evidence for compositional generalization across a wide array of different tasks,” says Charlie Wilson, a tenured researcher at the Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) and the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute in Lyon, who was not involved in the new research. “The interesting element here is the step towards showing a neural basis for that.” The new work is part of a growing effort in the field to “bring modern techniques and modern understanding back to bear on this kind of question,” says Tim Buschman, professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University. Buschman was not involved in the study but co-authored a 2025 Nature paper showing how macaques use compositional generalization to respond with specific eye movements to different types of images. “I think it’s really wonderful seeing evidence for these types of components.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30287 - Posted: 06.20.2026

By Vanessa Hadid, Karim Jerbi, John W. Krakauer Late at night, in neighboring apartments, two people sit alone in front of glowing screens. A university student types into an artificial-intelligence (AI) companion he has started confiding in: “I feel like nobody really understands me.” Next door, a young professional opens a chatbot she has begun to rely on most evenings: “I tried following your advice today, but I still couldn’t finish everything I was supposed to do.” The responses appear instantly: reassuring, thoughtful, even caring. Over time, both people begin to feel these conversations are deeply genuine, as though something on the other side truly understands them. Yet nothing in these systems experiences loneliness, empathy, stress or care. They generate responses from statistical patterns learned across vast amounts of language data. As neuroscientists, we find this reaction unsurprising but concerning. It reveals something important not about machines, but about us. Humans are quick to infer the presence of a mind when behavior looks right. When language is fluent and emotionally attuned, we take it as evidence of inner experience. That intuition feels natural, but it is misleading. Today’s AI systems can sound perceptive and empathetic, yet there is no evidence that these systems are actually experiencing anything. As the use of AI companions and therapeutic tools spreads, this confusion carries real risks. The question is not whether AI is becoming conscious, but why it so easily seems that way. Here, we approach the AI consciousness debate through the lens of neuroscience. Research on nonconscious processing in the human brain shows that behavior that is complex, goal directed and even emotionally responsive can unfold without awareness. This reminds us that behavior and experience can come apart, and that we should resist treating AI’s fluent and seemingly empathetic performance as evidence of a mind. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Consciousness; Robotics
Link ID: 30275 - Posted: 06.10.2026

By Natalia Mesa Dopamine neurons register surprise: Their activity surges when an experience exceeds expectations and falls silent with disappointment. These prediction errors help brains and artificial-intelligence systems learn from experience by updating future expectations, according to a long-standing model. But because dopamine neurons receive input from several sources, the exact circuit mechanisms that compute the difference have remained mysterious, says Naoshige Uchida, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. It turns out that a circuit of just two types of neurons is central to this computation. Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area calculate the error based on input originating from D1 medium spiny neurons in the striatum, according to unpublished mouse data Uchida and his team presented at this year’s Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) annual meeting and reported in a preprint posted on bioRxiv in October 2025. This result suggests that “reward learning doesn’t necessarily involve higher-order computation,” says Kauê Costa, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was not involved in the work. “The canonical view is that these types of computations would involve higher-order areas.” But it also bolsters the reward prediction error model, which has come under scrutiny in recent years, says Nathaniel Daw, professor of computational and theoretical neuroscience at Princeton University, who was not involved in the study. “It’s amazing” how much explanatory power the model has had in predicting neuronal responses, he adds. “It’s been a long road to get here. It’s a really beautiful study.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30270 - Posted: 06.06.2026

By Elizabeth Preston To our human eyes, a mouse’s furred face doesn’t betray much emotion. But if you watch the body language of a mouse who’s reunited with one of her sisters after five days in a cage alone, you might suspect you know what she’s feeling. The formerly isolated mouse chatters in squeaks too high for a human to hear. She follows her sister, crawling beneath the other mouse’s body as if trying to get a hug. She looks like she’s feeling what you or I feel when meeting a long-lost friend or a family member — maybe with more sniffing. Loneliness isn’t just for humans, and neither are its harms. Over the past decade or so, some researchers have come to believe that an animal’s craving for the company of others isn’t just a preference, but a basic, deeply held need. When we don’t socialize enough, we feel the lack like hunger or thirst, they say. When we’ve had our fill of togetherness, we feel satisfied or quenched. The amount of socializing a creature needs may be particular to that species, and even to that individual. Scientists have found within-species social differences in birds, monkeys, fish and even cockroaches. Among humans, “you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office,” says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Whatever the ideal degree of togetherness, Tye and others think that an animal’s need to balance time alone and time with others represents a kind of homeostasis: an equilibrium that’s critical for survival. Today, they are on a hunt to find where, in the brain, this equilibrium is controlled — and hoping their work will hold dividends for lonely humans.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30269 - Posted: 06.06.2026

By Nora Bradford General anesthesia shuts off conscious awareness, but what do our brains process while we’re under? Individual neurons in a brain region known for its role in memory consolidation can detect unexpected sounds, decode the nuances of language and even predict upcoming word types in a sentence, all while a patient is fully anesthetized, researchers report May 6 in Nature. Scientists have been gathering mounting evidence that even when unconscious, our brains can track certain aspects of speech. “The field was already moving toward a more nuanced picture [of what the unconscious brain can do], but this study pushes the boundary considerably further,” says Athena Akrami, a neuroscientist at University College London who was not involved with the research. To peer into the unconscious brain, neurosurgeon Kalman Katlowitz of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and colleagues monitored activity in the hippocampi of seven anesthetized patients. The team used a technology developed within the last few years called a Neuropixels probe. These high-density microelectrodes can record the electrical activity of hundreds of individual neurons simultaneously, rather than listening to the collective activity of groups of neurons. The team inserted these probes into patients’ hippocampi, in tissue slated for surgical removal as part of epilepsy treatment. While the patients were under general anesthesia, the researchers played various sounds through headphones. For some patients, this consisted of a series of uniform pure tones interspersed with occasional, unexpected “oddball” tones of a different frequency. For others, the researchers played 10 to 20 minutes of educational videos and storytelling podcasts, like The Moth Radio Hour, to evaluate how the brain processes natural speech. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Consciousness; Sleep
Link ID: 30265 - Posted: 06.03.2026

R. J. Mackenzie At dawn in late January 1998, two men entered the home of Betty Black in Farmers Branch, a suburb of Dallas, Texas. They killed her in an apparent burglary gone wrong. A few hours later, an eyewitness — Black’s neighbour — described what she had seen to police. She said that two white men with long hair had got out of a car and walked towards Black’s house in the early morning light. The neighbour, Jill Barganier, went to the police station the next day and identified Richard Childs, a white man with long hair, as the car’s driver. Childs would later confess to his involvement and serve 16 years in prison. Over the next week, the police homed in on 28-year-old Charles Don Flores as the second suspect. Flores had been seen with Childs on the morning of the murder, but he was a Latino man with short hair. On 4 February, Barganier was called to the police station. There, in an attempt to jog her memory, an officer used ‘forensic hypnosis’, a discredited practice that has since been discontinued in Texas and many other jurisdictions. During the session, he suggested to Barganier that one of the men might have had “neatly trimmed” hair. She once again described the passenger as a white man with long hair and then helped police to produce a composite sketch that looked nothing like Flores. She studied another photo line-up consisting of Flores and five other Latino men with short hair; she didn’t recognize any of them. More than a year later, however, in March 1999, Barganier’s memory had changed. She testified in court that Flores was in the car, saying that she was “over 100 percent” sure that he was the man she had seen. In the absence of DNA evidence connecting Flores to the crime, this testimony became the cornerstone of the prosecution’s case. A jury convicted Flores of capital murder, and he is currently on death row. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Attention; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30259 - Posted: 05.27.2026

By Christina Caron Dr. Kyle Staller is a gastroenterologist, so it may be surprising that many of his patients come to him complaining not only about stomach trouble but about their brains, too. Irritable bowel syndrome and other digestive dysfunction can be accompanied by a mental haze. People experiencing constipation and bloating, for example, may describe “a sense of heaviness or being weighed down both physically and mentally,” said Dr. Staller, who works at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. “So many of my patients talk about problems like fatigue, brain fog and feeling sluggish,” he added. Scientists are making progress in understanding how the pathway between the brain and the digestive system influences our overall health. They call it the gut-brain axis, and it has been shown to play a big role in immune system support, anxiety, depression, metabolism and disease prevention. It can also affect mental clarity. We asked scientists and clinicians what to know about the gut and brain fog. How does the gut-brain axis work? There are thousands of fibers running from the brain to the abdomen that are known as the vagus nerve. It is a primary conduit of the gut-brain axis. And as the main nerve of the parasympathetic nervous system, it helps the body rest, digest and deter inflammation. Signals also travel back and forth between the gut and brain via stress hormones and immune cells. Crucially, gut bacteria produce chemical messengers (called neurotransmitters) like serotonin, dopamine and GABA that affect the nervous system. When they enter the bloodstream or stimulate the vagus nerve, they can help improve mood, drive motivation, and calm the nervous system. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 30243 - Posted: 05.16.2026

By Kristen French What is a cat, and how do we know when we’ve encountered one? This question may be harder to answer than it seems. Neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl Miller say people typically think about categories such as cat and apple backward—bottom-up instead of top-down. In reality, you don’t hear a meow, and see whiskers and paws and then conclude, “Cat!” Before any of this happens, your brain has sent signals about a “cat hypothesis”—and a plan for how to respond to a cat—to your body, based on past experience, Barrett and Miller say. This cat hypothesis, in turn, actively orchestrates what signals your body processes and how. In other words, the brain constructs classifications on the fly, and we’re not even conscious this is happening until after the fact. Barrett, a renowned Harvard neuroscientist and psychologist who has written for Nautilus and is best known for her theory of constructed emotion, teamed up with Miller to review “converging” evidence from a wide range of disciplines: neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, brain imaging, and cognitive science. The pair published their results recently in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience. Their new theory of categories has a lot in common with Barrett’s theory of how emotions work. She argues that emotions aren’t hardwired universal reactions, but are instead predictions constructed rapidly and in the moment from internal bodily sensations, past experiences, and cultural context. While her work on emotions has been highly influential, it remains an active subject of debate in the field of psychology. I spoke with Barrett and Miller about what they call “folk psychology,” and how their theory of categorization relates to so-called beginner’s mind, human bias, and objectivity and mental illness. We also talked about Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s modes of thinking fast and slow. © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Attention; Emotions
Link ID: 30226 - Posted: 05.02.2026

By Nora Bradford If you were to imagine a waterfall, a misty cascade into an azure pool surrounded by towering trees might come to mind. That mental vision might also be accompanied by the imagined roar of water splashing down. But when it comes to our brains, does imagining a waterfall activate different areas compared with seeing or hearing one in real life? For both sounds and sights, the overlap between imagination and perception appears not in brain areas linked to a single sense, but in high-level areas that accept multiple types of sensory inputs, researchers report March 31 in Neuron. For years, cognitive neuroscientist Rodrigo Braga has been working to determine whether the human brain is processing mental imagery through hearing and other senses or whether something else is at play. “When I was a teenager, I remember the first time realizing that there’s like a voice I can hear in my head and thinking, ‘Oh, that’s really strange’,” says Braga, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. In this study, he and his colleagues prompted eight participants to imagine scenes, faces, someone else speaking, internal monologues and sounds while in an MRI scanner. The small number of individuals allowed the researchers to collect hours of MRI data to create individualized brain maps rather than averaging across individuals. This technique allowed the team to reliably find individual variation in brain activity during imagination. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Consciousness; Attention
Link ID: 30214 - Posted: 04.26.2026

By Chand Chandrasekaran Decisions emerge from coordinated activity patterns across many brain areas. The challenge we face as neuroscientists is figuring out how. Technologies such as Neuropixels and optical imaging enable recordings from populations of neurons across many brain areas, leading to enormously impressive datasets with thousands of neurons. But making sense of these data to uncover the computations underlying decision-making has proved elusive. I think it is a great time for the field to design experiments that match the ambition of our tools. By designing decision-making tasks that vary along multiple dimensions and truly challenge our animals, we might finally understand how multiple brain areas coordinate to drive decisions. The starting point of most decision-making experiments is to get animals to perform a task for rewards, such as juice or food. It is often tempting to train the animal to do “something simple” because the training is easy and quick. Later we can get to the “exciting stuff”: Go in with a kitchen sink of experimental tools to collect neurophysiological data and/or perturb the system and use mathematical tools to uncover how activity in the brain leads to the behavior of interest. Though this approach sounds great in principle, analyzing the neural data associated with simple behavioral tasks can be challenging for multiple reasons. First, when the behavior is too simple, the brain does not need to compute much. When many areas could solve a problem, often they do: Relevant signals pop up all over the brain, leaving us with the somewhat puzzling conclusion that the behavior is global. But some tasks may be too trivial to require different computations from different areas, so it’s unsurprising that many areas look similar in such contexts. Second, animals perform simple tasks quickly, generating only a narrow window of neural activity from which to try to make sense of how they reached a decision. You might be left with just 50 milliseconds of potentially very noisy neural data from which to understand decision-related computations. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 30211 - Posted: 04.22.2026

Jon Hamilton It's often called the mind's eye. "I can look at an object in the world around me, but I can also close my eyes and imagine the object," says Varun Wadia, a brain scientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the California Institute of Technology. That sort of visual imagination, Wadia says, is what allows most people to conjure the face of a loved one or navigate to work using a mental map. For 'time cells' in the brain, what matters is what happens in the moment Shots - Health News For 'time cells' in the brain, what matters is what happens in the moment But its neural underpinnings were a mystery until Wadia and a team reported in the journal Science that imagined and perceived objects appear to activate the same neurons and use the same neural code. "This has not been demonstrated before at the neural level," says Kalanit Grill-Spector, a psychology professor at Stanford University's Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, who was not involved in the research. With these insights, she says, scientists are one step closer to building computer models that can simulate vision as well as vision disorders like macular degeneration. These models, in turn, could help researchers develop prosthetic devices to restore sight. The research also helps explain how the brain uses imagination to augment visual information, says Thomas Naselaris, a neuroscientist at the University of Minnesota. © 2026 npr

Keyword: Vision; Consciousness
Link ID: 30210 - Posted: 04.22.2026

Nicholas Humphrey In his novel Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France spins a wonderful tale about a blind old monk who sets off from Brittany on a mission to the Hebrides and lands on an island inhabited only by penguins. Though the birds speak a strange language, he assumes they must be human beings. So he proceeds to baptise them. When the news of this reaches heaven, it causes a major stir. God himself is embarrassed. He gathers an assembly of clerics and doctors, and asks them for an opinion on the delicate question of whether the birds must now be given souls. It is a matter of more than theoretical importance. ‘The Christian state,’ St Cornelius points out, ‘is not without serious inconveniences for a penguin … The habits of birds are, in many points, contrary to the commandments of the Church …’ After lengthy discussion, they settle on a compromise. The baptised penguins are indeed to be granted souls – but, on St Catherine’s recommendation, their souls are to be of small size. For the penguins, souls were an unexpected bonus. As René Descartes, the philosopher-scientist of the 17th century, had explained, nonhuman animals in general, in a state of nature, are mere soulless machines. Here’s a sketch of a Cartesian penguin, without even a smidgen of a soul. Descartes believed that humans too are machines of a kind. But he held that, with humans, thankfully, God has arranged the addition of a soul as standard practice. Early in infancy, the material substance of the human brain is put into communication via the pineal gland with the separate substance of the mind: res extensa (extended stuff) is joined by res cogitans (thinking stuff). The consciousness that results lays the foundation for the soul. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026

Keyword: Consciousness; Language
Link ID: 30204 - Posted: 04.18.2026

By Katie Engelhart The doctor told her that her husband was just a vegetable now. “And he’s always just going to be a vegetable.” Did he really say it like that? Vegetable? And, just? Well, that’s how she remembers it. In his notes, the doctor wrote that his patient’s prognosis was “Poor/Grave.” A few weeks earlier, on Oct. 4, 2024, while on a trip out of town, Aaron Williams said that his stomach hurt. Then he started vomiting and couldn’t stop, and then he started screaming. His wife, Tabitha, tried to drive him back home to Aiken, S.C. — and she was almost there, maybe 30 minutes away, when Aaron’s body stiffened and his limbs flung out and he went quiet. At the hospital, Aaron, who was 30, was found to be in cardiac arrest. Doctors performed CPR, and when it did not work, they did it again and again; Aaron’s small, lithe body — just 5-foot-8, 135 pounds — heaved under the force of it, until after five rounds of compressions his heart started beating again. Doctors inserted a breathing tube and attached it to a ventilator next to Aaron’s bed. Sitting at her comatose husband’s side, Tabitha could hear its quiet mechanical hiss. As it turned out, Aaron, who has Type 1 diabetes, had not been taking his insulin. Part of it, maybe, was hubris; he had been a diabetic since forever, and he thought he knew his body well enough to know when his glucose levels were really off-kilter. Also, he didn’t have a prescription; Aaron and Tabitha had recently moved, with five of their children, and he still hadn’t found a new family doctor who would take Medicaid. Doctors did a CT scan, an electroencephalogram (EEG) and later an M.R.I., and they saw evidence of a global anoxic brain injury and “severe cortical dysfunction.” There was cerebral swelling too: so much that his brain pushed outward against his skull, partly flattening the folds and ridges that covered its surface. When he was examined, Aaron had no blink reflex, and he didn’t respond to sound. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 30202 - Posted: 04.15.2026

By Diana Kwon The ability to conjure pictures in the mind’s eye enables us to remember the past and imagine the future. It also allows us to plan, navigate and create works of art. In a study published April 9 in Science, researchers report that imagining an object reactivates some of the same neurons involved in seeing it in the first place, providing new insight into how mental imagery is produced in the brain. Previous research had hinted that the neurons involved in perceiving and imagining images overlapped. These studies used various methods, such as asking participants to view and then imagine pictures while lying in a functional MRI scanner, to show that the same brain regions were involved in these processes. But whether the same individual neurons were involved remained an open question, says Ueli Rutishauser, a neuroscientist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Because measuring neuronal activity requires electrodes in the brain, Rutishauser and colleagues studied 16 adults with epilepsy who had already had electrodes temporarily implanted into their brains to identify the origin of their seizures. Participants viewed hundreds of images from five categories — faces, text, plants, animals and everyday objects — while researchers recorded activity from over 700 neurons in the ventral temporal cortex, a region involved in representing visual objects. Of those, about 450 selectively responded to individual categories. Machine learning then revealed that 80 percent of those category-responsive neurons were selective to specific visual features within the images. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Attention; Vision
Link ID: 30195 - Posted: 04.11.2026

By Andrew Jacobs As researchers have sought to demonstrate the therapeutic benefits of mind-altering drugs like LSD and psilocybin “magic mushrooms,” many have struggled to explain exactly how these compounds work on the human brain. One way scientists have tried to show what these compounds do is by using functional M.R.I. machines to peer into the brains of research participants in the midst of a psychedelic experience. This has produced evocative color images that show a maelstrom of activity as the drugs disrupt patterns of connectivity between brain regions and networks. But the interpretations of those scans, published in scientific journals, have been inconsistent and even contradictory. Over the past five years, an international consortium of researchers has tried to make sense of the divergent results by bringing together the data from nearly a dozen brain imaging studies in five countries that have been published since 2012. The studies included more than 500 scans of 267 research participants on five substances: LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT and ayahuasca. Their findings, published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, suggest that psychedelics prompt a welter of activity between regions of the brain that normally operate somewhat independently: the areas that process sensory information like vision, hearing and touch, and those involved with abstract thinking and self-reflection. The research suggests that psychedelic compounds temporarily reduce the separation between how we think and how we perceive, which could explain the neurological mechanics behind the sensory distortions, mystical experiences and ego dissolution that patients report during sessions. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Consciousness
Link ID: 30193 - Posted: 04.08.2026