brains and behavior

[ad_1] If the bars look a bit emptier this month, it may be because more people are trading happy hour for Dry January. The tradition, in which people abstain from…

[ad_1] Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in the 1990s, neuroimaging studies revealed that…

[ad_1] In June 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became convinced that the AI program he’d been working on—LaMDA—had developed not only intelligence but also consciousness. LaMDA is an…

[ad_1] If you think your dog loves you, you’re a fool. If you feel a kinship with a tree, you’re a hippie. And if you over-empathize with a wild animal,…

[ad_1] A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of…

[ad_1] The most widely tested brain implant is the Utah array—a hard silicon square with 100 tiny protruding needles. Each about a millimeter long, the needles have electrodes on their…

[ad_1] Watching the Alzheimer’s research world from the outside over the past two years has felt like a car ride over an unpaved mountain road without a seatbelt. In 2021,…

[ad_1] We’re often told to “be here now.” Yet the mind is rarely tethered in place. We take mental trips to our past, revisiting what happened yesterday or when we…

[ad_1] Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his PhD in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved…

[ad_1] Further evidence of this bias comes from the reaction of the mice when they were first put into learning situations. Before they knew whether the new associations would be…

[ad_1] “It may be that stimulation of the nucleus accumbens altered the reward circuitry in the brain such that it turned down the volume on the pleasurable craving that patients…

[ad_1] The tiny blobs of lab-grown human brain tissue were just specks, each measuring a few millimeters in diameter. Researchers at Stanford University made them by cultivating human stem cells…

[ad_1] In the new study’s first phase, each subject had their moment in front of the GoPros and microphone. Previous studies have established that tickling is mood-dependent—anxiety and unfamiliarity suppress…

[ad_1] So neuroscientists use an approach called “dimensionality reduction” to make such visualization possible—they take data from thousands of neurons and, by applying clever techniques from linear algebra, describe their…

[ad_1] For a decade now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat”…

[ad_1] Even for people who have the time and money to choose, it’s hard to know what to look for. In the absence of a referral or personal recommendation, many…

[ad_1] This was slow going. “We spent a lot of time, probably the first couple of years, really just working out the immunopanning and culturing the astrocytes,” recalls Caldwell. One…

[ad_1] Sophie Papp and her family had a ritual for the recently departed. Whenever a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all squeeze into a car and…

[ad_1] And co-benefits make a lot of sense: People might reasonably feel more empowered to affect their own health than the health of the entire planet. Self-efficacy (the perception that…