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Category: Neuroscience

The dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

The dangers of seeing human minds as predictive machines

Joseph Fridman writes: The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your brand loyalties, your cravings, the arc of your desires. The company’s core market is what the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as ‘prediction products’: guesses about the future, assembled…

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Reading, that strange and uniquely human thing

Reading, that strange and uniquely human thing

Lydia Wilson writes: The Chinese artist Xu Bing has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Last year I visited the Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, to see a retrospective of his work. One installation, Book from the Sky, featured scrolls of paper looping down from the ceiling and lying along the floor of a large room, printed Chinese characters emerging into view as I moved closer to the reams of paper. But this…

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Where is the dividing line between you and the world

Where is the dividing line between you and the world

Frédérique de Vignemont and Colin Klein write: Heini Hediger, a noted 20th-century Swiss biologist and zoo director, knew that animals ran away when they felt unsafe. But when he set about designing and building zoos himself, he realised he needed a more precise understanding of how animals behaved when put in proximity to one another. Hediger decided to investigate the flight response systematically, something that no one had done before. Hediger found that the space around an animal could be…

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How the gut protects the brain

How the gut protects the brain

Deborah Devis writes: The gut is well known for being the first line of defence against infection, but it seems it also protects our most important organ – the brain. According to surprising new research, antibodies that defend the perimeter of the brain are normally found in, and trained by, our gut. “This finding opens a new area of neuroimmunology, showing that gut-educated antibody-producing cells inhabit and defend regions that surround the central nervous system,” says Dorian McGavern from the…

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‘Time cells’ enable cinematic memory

‘Time cells’ enable cinematic memory

NPR reports: If you fall off a bike, you’ll probably end up with a cinematic memory of the experience: the wind in your hair, the pebble on the road, then the pain. That’s known as an episodic memory. And now researchers have identified cells in the human brain that make this sort of memory possible, a team reports in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The cells are called time cells, and they place a sort of…

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Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

Are the brain’s electromagnetic fields the seat of consciousness?

Tam Hunt writes: Christof Koch is a neuroscientist distinguished by his rock-solid scientific work and romantic yearning to understand consciousness. He recently closed an essay by wondering: “What is it about the brain, the most complex piece of active matter in the known universe, that turns its activity into the feeling of life itself?” No coincidence with that phrasing—The Feeling of Life Itself is his latest book. He argues that consciousness is produced by the brain but that it’s also…

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Your livewired brain makes you a different person every day

Your livewired brain makes you a different person every day

Steve Paulson writes: Brain “plasticity” is one of the great discoveries in modern science, but neuroscientist David Eagleman thinks the word is misleading. Unlike plastic, which molds and then retains a particular shape, the brain’s physical structure is continually in flux. But Eagleman can’t avoid the word. “The whole literature uses that term plasticity, so I use it sparingly,” he says. Eagleman also discounts computer analogies to the brain. He’s coined the term “livewired” (the title of his new book)…

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How our brain sculpts experience in line with our expectations

How our brain sculpts experience in line with our expectations

Daniel Yon writes: The Book of Days (1864) by the Scottish author Robert Chambers reports a curious legal case: in 1457 in the town of Lavegny, a sow and her piglets were charged and tried for the murder of a partially eaten small child. After much deliberation, the court condemned the sow to death for her part in the act, but acquitted the naive piglets who were too young to appreciate the gravity of their crimes. Subjecting a pig to…

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Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought a primarily human attribute

Sharon Begley writes: Whether crows, ravens, and other “corvids” are making multipart tools like hooked sticks to reach grubs, solving geometry puzzles made famous by Aesop, or nudging a clueless hedgehog across a highway before it becomes roadkill, they have long impressed scientists with their intelligence and creativity. Now the birds can add one more feather to their brainiac claims: Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their…

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The neurons that appeared from nowhere

The neurons that appeared from nowhere

Nayanah Siva writes: The scientists crowded around Yuanchao Xue’s petri dish. They couldn’t identify the cells that they were seeing. “We saw a lot of cells with spikes growing out of the cell surface,” said Xiang-Dong Fu, the research team’s leader at the University of California, San Diego. “None of us really knew that much about neuroscience, and we asked around and someone said that these were neurons.” The team, who were made up of basic cellular and molecular scientists,…

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Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health

Mitochondria may hold keys to anxiety and mental health

Elizabeth Landau writes: Carmen Sandi recalls the skepticism she faced at first. A behavioral neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, she had followed a hunch that something going on inside critical neural circuits could explain anxious behavior, something beyond brain cells and the synaptic connections between them. The experiments she began in 2013 showed that neurons involved in anxiety-related behaviors showed abnormalities: Their mitochondria, the organelles often described as cellular power plants, didn’t work well —…

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Love is medicine for fear

Love is medicine for fear

Arthur C. Brooks writes: We are living in a time of fear. The coronavirus pandemic has threatened our lives, health, and economy in ways most Americans have never experienced. We have no idea what the future will bring. According to the American Psychological Association’s annual “Stress in America” survey, the percentage of people in the U.S. who say that “the future of our nation is a significant source of stress” rose to 83 percent in June 2020, up from 63…

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Psychobiome: The gut bacteria that may alter how you think, feel, and act

Psychobiome: The gut bacteria that may alter how you think, feel, and act

Science reports: Katya Gavrish is searching for new brain drugs in a seemingly unlikely place: human stool samples. An earnest and focused microbiologist who trained in Russia and loves classical music, she’s standing in front of a large anaerobic chamber in a lab at Holobiome, a small startup company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She reaches into the glass-fronted chamber through Michelin Man–like sleeves to begin to dilute the sample inside. That’s the first step toward isolating and culturing bacteria that Gavrish…

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How emotions connect your body and brain

How emotions connect your body and brain

Kevin Berger writes: Do you think you can read emotions like joy or anger in another person’s face and actions? Read them because joy and anger are universal emotions and we all know what they look and feel like? Well, if so, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, you are winging it, guessing at best. Emotions like happiness and despair are not baked into our brains, waiting to be triggered by experiences in the world. Sure, we have a range of…

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There is no homunculus in our brain who guides us

There is no homunculus in our brain who guides us

M.R. O’Connor writes: In the early 1980s, the psychologist Harry Heft put a 16 mm camera in the back of a sports car and made a movie. It consisted of a continuous shot of a residential neighborhood in Granville, Ohio, where Heft was a professor at Denison University. It didn’t have a plot or actors, but it did have a simple narrative: The car started moving at 5 miles per hour and made nine turns from one street to another…

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The biology of love

The biology of love

Ruth Feldman writes: After decades following thousands of mother-infant dyads, hundreds from birth to young adulthood, my lab has mapped the ‘neurobiology of affiliation’ – the emerging scientific field that describes the neural, endocrine and behavioural systems sustaining our capacity to love. The foci of our research – the oxytocin system (based on the neurohormone of bonding); the affiliative, or social, brain; and biological synchrony between mother and child – are all marked by great plasticity, and sculpted throughout animal…

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