Mariana Lenharo As artificial-intelligence systems become more and more sophisticated, the question of whether they might become conscious is capturing the public’s attention — and is sending tech firms to hire philosophers. The problem is, researchers still haven’t agreed on what gives rise to consciousness in humans, let alone an AI chatbot. So some scientists who study human consciousness — the subjective state of being aware of yourself and your surroundings — worry that all the hype will make it harder to find answers. “What we might see is a sort of capture of consciousness research by the AI sector, where less emphasis is placed on the neuroscience and philosophy of how consciousness happens in real brains, and more on looking for computational ‘signatures’ of consciousness in AI,” says Anil Seth, a consciousness scientist at the University of Sussex near Brighton, UK. Seth and others think that consciousness is very unlikely outside of biological organisms and are frustrated by the focus on AI. Some are suspicious of AI firms’ hype, and think that there should be more investigation of how the humanization of chatbots could affect people negatively. But there are researchers who think that tech firms’ obsession with consciousness is a boon for a field that was not taken seriously as a scientific endeavour for years. They see the hype as bringing more interest and, importantly, more funding. Running into problems Earlier this month, it became clear that determining whether an AI system is sentient will be extremely challenging without knowing more about human consciousness. Researchers at AI firm Anthropic, in San Francisco, California, posted a non-peer-reviewed study suggesting that they had found something in the company’s large language model (LLM) Claude that is comparable to conscious thoughts in humans. By measuring patterns in Claude’s processing, they uncovered words that Claude ‘thought’ about as it worked through a request but did not necessarily include in its output. The authors compare this internal activity with the brain’s ‘global workspace’, a concept borrowed from one of the most popular theories of human consciousness. The global workspace theory (GWT) posits that information enters human consciousness when it is broadcast across the brain, in a type of processing hub for the mind. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Consciousness
Link ID: 30350 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Maria Godoy School used to be pretty easy for Kate Jarvis when she was a little girl, back in the 1980s. She was a straight-A student, creative, and so organized that she'd even prep her toothbrush with toothpaste each night before school. She says her mother used to call her "bright-eyed and bushy tailed." Then puberty hit, and everything started to fall apart. She found it harder to focus in school, and her grades slipped. "It really hit my self-esteem badly. I felt pretty awful about myself," she says. In high school, she was diagnosed with anxiety and depression. She struggled to fit in. She says it stung when teachers would write comments like, "Kate has so much potential, if only she'd apply herself." "So it felt like character flaws rather than what it really was, which was undiagnosed ADHD," says Jarvis, who didn't get a diagnosis until her late 30s. Kate Jarvis says that her diagnosis of ADHD in her 30s felt revolutionary. “Something I had been wrestling with for 25 years had a name, causes, symptoms and effects.” However, the diagnosis came with challenges as well. “Just because you know what something is, doesn’t mean you can immediately fix it. And that’s what I felt, like I needed to fix myself.” Kate Jarvis says that her diagnosis of ADHD in her 30s felt revolutionary. "Something I had been wrestling with for 25 years had a name, causes, symptoms and effects." However, the diagnosis came with challenges as well. "Just because you know what something is, doesn't mean you can immediately fix it. And that's what I felt - like I needed to fix myself." Jarvis family © 2026 npr

Keyword: ADHD; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30348 - Posted: 07.29.2026

Stephani Sutherland One night in 2000, Allan Basbaum was at the Pierre Hotel on Central Park, wearing a tuxedo after presenting a neuroscience award to one of his colleagues before a roomful of scientists, Nobel laureates among them. His wife, Carol, a cancer biologist, had accompanied him from San Francisco, where they both ran laboratories at the University of California. Late that night, he was struck by agonising stomach pain. Alarmed, they went to the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital, where the waiting area was jammed and hours passed before anyone could see him. ‘So I’m out in the waiting room; I’m periodically screaming,’ Basbaum says. After two hours, Carol went to the bathroom, leaving him alone. Finally, a man came over and began speaking to him, gently prodding him. ‘He checks my pulse, he asks: “Does this hurt?”’ Basbaum says. As the man attended to him, ‘the pain really started to get much better,’ and Basbaum relaxed. When Carol returned, he told her about the long-awaited treatment. ‘She says: “Allan, he’s one of the patients. He’s been doing that to everybody here.” But finally, someone was taking care of me.’ And that brought relief. By then, Basbaum had spent three decades studying the physiology of pain, mapping the neural circuits that carry signals from the body toward the brain. He wanted to understand how those signals become pain. His experience brought to life the questions he’d been marvelling at for years: how do fear, context and expectation shape the body’s most urgent alarm? How do placebos work? And how could someone relieve his pain, just by paying attention? Basbaum understood the Gordian knot at the heart of pain: the brain could influence pain before a person consciously felt it. His work over the past 50 years has been to untangle that loop, following signals through the spinal cord to the brain and back again. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026.

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Attention
Link ID: 30344 - Posted: 07.25.2026

By K. R. Callaway You (probably) won’t find a monkey in a geometry class, but it looks like our fellow primates can swing the basics. Just like people, monkeys seem to grasp the abstract qualities of geometric shapes, such as whether they are symmetrical, have parallel sides or contain right angles, according to a new study published on Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This ability allows the monkeys — and us — to understand when two shapes are the same, even when they’ve been rotated or resized. This finding challenges a long-held notion that humans’ geometric abilities are part of what makes our brains one of a kind. “Our hypothesis was that humans are not that unique,” in possessing this mathematical understanding, said Jialin Li, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University and the lead author of the study. In their experiment, Ms. Li and her colleagues decided to give monkeys (a total of eight rhesus macaques and olive baboons), preschoolers and adult humans with different education levels the same geometric task. That way, if humans truly had an innate advantage, it would show up when comparing the young children and the monkeys. And if the advantage was learned, it might show up when comparing the humans who had different levels of schooling. It was a challenge to find a task simple enough that even preschool-aged children and monkeys could reasonably complete it, but the team eventually decided to have all the study participants do a matching task. All were shown a shape with a specific size and geometric form on a screen. Then they were asked to pick that same shape out of a group of others. “By manipulating the similarity of the shapes, we were able to look at what kinds of rules they’re using,” said Jessica Cantlon, a cognitive neuroscientist at Carnegie Mellon University whose lab conducted the study. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Vision; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30337 - Posted: 07.22.2026

By Rachel Nuwer It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point, if he was awake, he also provided a saliva sample and filled out a survey about his mood. The room looked like a cell, or perhaps a very cramped hotel room, but in fact it was a metabolic research chamber, one of only 50 of its kind in the world. Its conspicuously small size prevented Picard from burning extra energy beyond the bare minimum needed to keep him alive. Napping during the day was prohibited, as was eating anything but the strictly scheduled meals tailored to his caloric needs. Bedtime was at 11 p.m. sharp. Before lights-out, Picard put on a device to monitor his vitals and brain activity while he slept. Though there wasn’t much to do — mostly he sat in bed reading or working on his laptop — excitement was the primary emotion Picard felt that day in July 2021. That’s because he was the first volunteer in an experiment run by the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab (opens a new tab), which he directs at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. By studying how much energy is required to sustain baseline existence, his lab aims to explore what he considers an overlooked factor in health and disease, from the level of molecules all the way up to the mind: mitochondria. Most middle school students learn that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. These organelles make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life, through a cascade of chemical reactions that breaks down glucose and fat from food. But mitochondria are much more than energy factories. Studies over the past decade have shown that they process all sorts of molecules, including neurotransmitters, hormones, and metabolites, which means they directly impact what we experience as mood, stress, sexual arousal, and the need to sleep. This makes them “the consilience point for many known processes demonstrated to underlie consciousness,” Picard said. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Consciousness; Evolution
Link ID: 30330 - Posted: 07.18.2026

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