#neuroscience

#neuroscience

With the use of a bootstrap experimental setup consisting of a large polystyrene ball, a curved computer monitor, and a small straw that dispenses sugar water, Tóth managed to teach a rat how to play the classic 1994 video game Doom II. The rat's movements translated into rotations of the ball, which were then translated into movement inside the iconic first-person shooter. The sugar water served as a treat whenever the rat completed a milestone, like walking down a corridor.

The brain's main task is to minimize the gap between expectation and reality. This gap is what the Free Energy Principle defines as free energy. When the brain encounters unpredictable input, its stress level rises. And it's crucial to understand: this isn't about you as a person or a "user", it's about your brain. It's not something we consciously control, but it's something we can use.

"[My train of thought] let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds letting the water lift it and sink it until-you know the little tug-the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line."

Last April, neuroscientist Sue Grigson received an e-mail from a man detailing his years-long struggle to kick addiction - first to opioids, and then to the very medication meant to help him quit. The man had stumbled on research by Grigson, suggesting that certain anti-obesity medications could help to reduce rats' addiction to drugs such as heroin and fentanyl. He decided to try quitting again, this time while taking semaglutide, the blockbuster GLP-1 drug better known as Ozempic.

Neuroscience and sports psychology (for example, acceptance and commitment therapy) show that anxiety, perfectionism, and fear of mistakes shrink cognitive flexibility and creativity. The more we obsess over results, the more our attention collapses into the future. This focus makes us less present with what is happening now. As mental performance coach Graham Betchart puts it: "Stress is the absence of presence."

Seneca, the ancient Stoic philosopher, wrote in Letters to Lucilius that it's not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor. The film "Fight Club" delivered the modern remix centuries later when Tyler Durden-played with feral brilliance by Brad Pitt-growled: The things you own end up owning you. One was writing in imperial Rome. The other was railing against the Ikea-ification of the modern soul. Yet both saw the same truth: Desire, when unquestioned, becomes bondage.

Fundamentally, they are based on gathering an extraordinary amount of linguistic data (much of it codified on the internet), finding correlations between words (more accurately, sub-words called "tokens"), and then predicting what output should follow given a particular prompt as input. For all the alleged complexity of generative AI, at their core they really are models of language.

In philosophy, physicalism is the idea that everything can be explained in physical terms. Whether through atoms, electrons, quarks, fields, or other physical processes, physicalism holds that every phenomenon ultimately depends on the physical world. In the philosophy of mind, this means that everything about the mind can, in principle, be explained by the physical processes of the brain. We don't yet know all the details, but physicalism maintains that a complete explanation is possible.

From Einstein's spacetime theory to the brain's internal clock, they examine whether time is an external property of the universe or a mental construct. By connecting physics and neuroscience, they unpack the idea that how we experience time may differ entirely from how it actually works. We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they're on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking.

Have you noticed how even well-planned organizational changes can leave teams feeling scattered, resistant, or quietly overwhelmed? Our research with more than 1,000 workplaces has found that 'poor change management' is consistently the most frequent cause of burnout in workplaces right now. The problem isn't a lack of project plans. Organizations have those in abundance. The gap is neurological. Too much focus on timelines and deliverables while overlooking what uncertainty does to people's brains.

Seeing an attractive face activates the brain's reward and social circuits releasing the feelgood hormone dopamine, writes Laura Elin Pigott, a senior lecturer in neurosciences and neurorehabilitation at London South Bank University. This hormone is also released when we happen to live up to a specific beauty standard, making this feel biologically gratifying. All is not lost though our perceptions can be retrained, apparently. The science makes it clear: our brains respond to what they're fed.

When we're under a lot of stress, our brains do something fascinating and often harmful to our relationships: They shift into scarcity mode. Often, people think of a scarcity mindset only as something related to our finances and resources: We don't have enough money, food, or time. But scarcity mindset, or the general belief that there isn't enough, impacts people in every area: their skills, their worth, their general capacity in life.

On TikTok, creator @olivia.unplugged called everyone out with a single post shared on Sept. 3, in which she discussed the downsides of multitasking. As an alternative to the chaos, she offered the 90-minute rule, which aims to boost your focus and productivity. "We've talked about the Pomodoro method," she said in the clip, which has over 155,000 likes. "But I raise you one: The 90-minute rule."

It was just enough time to break the spell of "sweet revenge" - a psychological phenomenon that, Kimmel argued, works very much like any other drug. When people are harboring a grievance, no matter its validity, Kimmel said, "It's a very real pain. And your brain really, really doesn't want pain - and so it instantly scrambles to rebalance that pain with pleasure."

As a journalist who covers AI, I hear from countless people who seem utterly convinced that ChatGPT, Claude, or some other chatbot has achieved "sentience." Or "consciousness." Or-my personal favorite-"a mind of its own." The Turing test was aced a while back, yes, but unlike rote intelligence, these things are not so easily pinned down. Large language models will claim to think for themselves, even describe inner torments or profess undying loves, but such statements don't imply interiority.

When you name what you're feeling you're not just talking. You're helping your brain shift gears. Research shows that labeling emotions reduces activity in the amygdala, the part of your brain that sounds the alarm. At the same time, it activates the prefrontal cortex, the part that helps you think clearly and make good decisions (Lieberman and colleagues, 2007). Naming your emotions helps you move from panic to power.

"We behave differently when we're anxious or when we're experiencing fear, versus when we are feeling courageous. And mice do the same," explained Alexandra Klein, postdoctoral researcher at UCSF, during a lab tour, adding that there are multiple experiments conducted in the lab to analyze a mouse's behavior - all this to understand human brain functions better and potentially cure diseases. The tour even showcased a real mouse brain in a test tube.

Neuroscience is a newcomer to the field of free will. What are exactly the kind of questions that are worth asking? What different kinds of experiments that can say something about conscious and unconscious decisions can help us be more modest in what we realize we can control, and what we can't? Generally, humans have a sense that they control themselves and sometimes their environment more than they do.

"How is digital technology shaping the human soul?,"

Recent advances in neuroscience indicate that the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex plays a central role in rapidly evaluating potential romantic partners, often without conscious awareness. Key findings show that specific regions within this cortex are responsible for making swift assessments, and these neural patterns can reliably predict whether someone will express romantic interest or decide to pursue further interaction after just a brief encounter.

He'd make things up that didn't happen. Then he'd get angry when questioned, as if remembering was an attack on him. Every time she brought up something he did wrong, suddenly the conversation became about her mental health, her past trauma, her inability to let things go. She started writing everything down because she couldn't trust her own memory anymore. When he found her journal, he said it proved she was paranoid.

Sometimes, you can be talking to someone for hours, and it feels like only a few minutes. You natter and natter without ever having to think of what to say or cringe through any awkward silence. There's a gentle sway to things - you listen, they speak, they listen, you speak. The chat dances to the easy and comfortable rhythm of the conversational tide.

Gonzalo de Polavieja, 56, is exasperated by the ease with which many people opine on topics without knowing anything about them. A neuroscientist trained at Oxford and Cambridge, with a PhD in quantum physics and a postdoctoral degree in mathematical neurobiology, he is currently on leave from Spain's CSIC research center and directs the Laboratory of Mathematics of Behavior and Intelligence at the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, where he studies how groups of animals including humans organize themselves.

As I've shared before, when I was 12, I was playing at a friend's house one hot August afternoon when I was told I was needed at home. As I turned into my long driveway, I saw the lights of an ambulance, a stretcher being loaded into the back. The doors slammed shut. The whirling lights threw red streaks across the oaks as it sped past me out of our driveway. No one noticed the small, pale, immobilized girl standing by the mailbox.