Janna Levin Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, however they are anything but that. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, or why a loved one’s touch soothes while a stranger’s touch repels. To explore the science behind these sensations, Janna Levin talked to Ishmail Abdus-Saboor (opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. Their conversation covers how pain serves an evolutionary purpose, how researchers measure pain and pleasure in the lab despite the absence of any objective biomarker, and how touch functions as a social and emotional signal, not just a sensory one. Abdus-Saboor also describes his work with naked mole rats — a species that barely feels pain, shows no signs of aging, and lives in colonies built almost entirely on touch — and the ethical trade-offs when studying sensations in animals that cannot describe what they feel. STROGATZ: It’s really mysterious, especially when you have pain that doesn’t really relate to tissue damage. Like, sometimes I’ll just be washing something at the sink in the kitchen, and then suddenly I have pain, and I think, “Come on, that’s ridiculous. I didn’t do anything to my back.” And, you know, people will tell you pain is mental. You can sort of talk yourself out of certain pain, which raises the point that pain is not as simple as it might seem at first. LEVIN: Yeah, and in particular, he studies this at the level of animals. But it’s one of these things that’s very hard for animals to tell you reliably what they’re experiencing. So, a lot of his work is really trying to interpret the animal’s interiority, the animal’s experience of different sensations. I was very fascinated about biology and biological systems and how animals communicate and cooperated. STROGATZ: Yeah, I wondered as you were describing this work, is it touch as a means to learn about interiority, or is touch the primary object of interest here? LEVIN: I mean, I think that that’s an interesting question. Like, with many scientific ambitions, sure, maybe the big goal is consciousness, right? But no, the big goal is always very far off. That’s not the language in which they’re operating. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 30366 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Sara Reardon The protein tau is best known for its potential to clog the brain. In neurodegenerative conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, chains of the molecule twist into tangles inside neurons and choke out the cells. But a new study suggests tau may play an earlier and more fundamental role in neurodegeneration: sneaking into the cell’s power-generating mitochondria—the cell’s power generators—and interfering with aging neurons’ energy production. If this process gets out of control, it creates tangle-prone forms of tau and other toxic byproducts that damage neurons, long before a person’s cognitive symptoms start. The research, published today in Neuron, also showed interrupting this process can prevent brain damage and disease symptoms in mice. “It really is opening up something we’ve needed for a while, which is some really new ideas and fresh directions” for understanding neurodegenerative diseases, says Kenneth Kosik, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who was not involved in the research. “I think this paper will reinvigorate the idea that [modifying tau] is going to be a possible therapeutic approach.” Researchers and companies developing treatments for Alzheimer’s have long seen tau as a potential drug target. One recent clinical trial, for instance, showed lowering the levels of tau in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s reduced their rate of cognitive decline by as much as 26%. Other approaches have tried to prevent enzymes from adding chemical tags called phosphate groups to tau proteins. These phosphorylated forms of tau (p-tau) are especially prone to misfolding and clumping into tangles. But tau therapies have seen limited success so far, leading researchers to wonder whether the protein actually drives neurodegeneration or is merely a sign of it. So geneticist Bingwei Lu of Stanford University and his colleagues set out to find specific ways in which p-tau affects cells. Previous research has suggested Alzheimer’s and other so-called tauopathies, including frontotemporal dementia and Parkinson’s disease, all involve problems with energy production in the brain’s mitochondria © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 30365 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Camille Bromley When Cameron LaBar was a kid, he was a towhead with bright blue eyes and big feelings. He seemed to sense things more strongly than other children. His family lived in Southern California, and when he was at the beach or playing in the yard, they’d put him on a double layer of towels so he wouldn’t scream when he got sand on his hands or was poked by the grass. Susan LaBar, his mother, called him the flip-top baby. He’d build up to a certain pressure, then erupt in tears. Around the age of 5, his face and body began repetitively twitching in ways he couldn’t control. Ms. LaBar bought books on Tourette’s syndrome and started highlighting things she recognized — until she was almost coloring in whole pages. In fourth grade, his teacher called her and said that he had gotten overwhelmed with instructions on an assignment and froze at his desk. She took him to a pediatric neurologist, who diagnosed him with Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Of her five children, Ms. LaBar thought, he was the most like her: anxious and sensitive. “He can’t take a deep breath,” she told the doctor. “He’s so knotted up.” The doctor suggested that Paxil, an antidepressant in the category known as S.S.R.I.s, could level things out for him. The doctor told her that Paxil would adjust what was going on in his head so he could do what he needed to do: relax, sit down in class and complete his homework. Giving her son psychiatric medication at 9 years old was not a decision Ms. LaBar took lightly. She thought about it every night for a week, then called the doctor and asked for a prescription at the lowest dose that would help him get unstuck from inside his own head. More than 20 years later, as an adult, Mr. LaBar looks back on that moment with ambivalence and regret. It was the start of a prolonged pharmaceutical spiral that kept him on medication without egress. He believes that the years he spent on antidepressants kept him from feeling the full range of his emotions — from living a full authentic life, even. He was not alone: When he described his experience online, he encountered a multitude of others who had a similar story. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30364 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Cody Cottier The twittering of songbirds may bear little resemblance to human speech, but new research on Bengalese finches shows that their vocalizations do follow a fundamental structural principle found in all languages. Zipf’s law states that a handful of words—or, in this case, chirps, whistles and trills—occur frequently, while most are rare. Specifically, the most common word (“the,” in English) appears roughly twice as often as the second-most common (“of”), three times as often as the third most common (“and”), and so on. This peculiar frequency distribution was also documented last year in humpback whale song, meaning it has emerged in at least three evolutionary lineages that are separated by millions of years. Though these wordlike units in songbirds and whales probably don’t convey specific meaning in the way that human words do, these discoveries challenge the notion that human language is wholly unique, says Simon Kirby, a cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author of both the whale and songbird studies. “We suddenly have these unrelated species that do something similar to what humans do,” he says. “This gives us a new dividing line, a new way of carving up communication systems in the world.” The dividing line, as Kirby sees it, lies between species that learn their vocal signals culturally and those whose calls are genetically built-in. Much like language, the songs of humpbacks and many songbirds get transmitted from one generation to the next. Because so-called Zipfian word distribution is known to help human infants pick up language from the adults around them, it stands to reason that similar patterns may aid learning in young birds and whales, too. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30363 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Natalia Mesa As an animal navigates the world, cells in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex produce rapid, repeating bursts of activity called theta sweeps: Grid and place cells fire in a specific sequence, first plotting the location the animal has just passed, then where it is currently and lastly what lies ahead. Whether these theta sweeps simply scan the surrounding environment or instead represent the deliberation and planning needed for goal-directed movement is “something that people have been arguing about for 30 years,” says David Redish, professor of neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. That debate may now be over: Theta sweeps serve both functions, depending on the situation, according to three new studies by independent teams. The brain produces systematic sweeps by default to passively sample an environment, but it switches to active, targeted sweeps whenever an animal is pursuing a goal or focused on something specific, the studies show. “It changes our conception of what theta sweeps do,” says Edvard Moser, professor of neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and an investigator on one of the new studies, published today in Science. The other two studies appeared last month in Nature Neuroscience. Theta sweeps occur within individual theta wave cycles, which are around 125-250 milliseconds long. The teams were able to detect the sweeps’ trajectories by recording hundreds of individual neurons at once in 10-millisecond blocks, a time resolution fine enough to see individual theta cycles, Moser says, adding that they are “invisible if you only look at the average.” © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30362 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Jake Buehler A craving for sweets may have helped set the stage for the evolution of the human brain. Over 4 million years, our lineage’s brains grew from about 300 grams to 1,500 grams. Much of the brain growth occurred before early humans had mastered both fire and cooking, which would have unlocked access to the energy of starches. A new analysis of existing data from human ancestors, as well as chimps, suggests that a large proportion of that energy probably came from sugary foods like fruits and honey. These simple carbohydrates may have played an important, overlooked role in humankind’s evolutionary story, researchers argue August 6 in Science. A major part of the story of diet and human evolution revolves around meat-eating: Around 2.5 million years ago, our hominid ancestors began increasing their intake of animal food. This influx of protein and fat is seen as instrumental in fueling our ancestors’ ever-expanding brains. But Jennie Brand-Miller, a human nutrition scientist at the University of Sydney, was interested in how dietary sugars factored into the lives and overall evolution of our early ancestors. A 2017 study suggested that fruit-eating primates had bigger brains than leaf-eating species. Other researchers had hypothesized in the 1990s that the cognitive demands of fruit eating may have kick-started the evolution of big brains in humans. “You need to remember when various species of ripe fruit begin to ripen, then you need to remember where it is in the forest,” Brand-Miller says. “Your memory is associated with a bigger brain.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Obesity; Evolution
Link ID: 30361 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Jake Currie No one knows what causes Alzheimer’s disease. There are plenty of risk factors associated with the neurodegenerative disease, like inflammation, smoking, and genetics, but so far no single culprit has emerged. A new study published in Translational Psychiatry, however, investigated the link between Alzheimer’s and another risk factor, depression, leading to some surprising results. Neuroscientists led by a team from the University of Southern California analyzed high-resolution MRI scans from more than 2,000 healthy adults between the ages of 50 and 90. Around a third of them (630) had been diagnosed with depression, and these subjects showed a significant decrease in volume in their hippocampus. The entire hippocampus wasn’t affected, though, just a smaller subfield responsible for retrieving memories, reconstructing memories from partial information, and distinguishing between similar experiences. “This study shows why it’s important to look beyond the total size of the hippocampus,” study co-author Meredith N. Braskie said in a statement. “Depression wasn’t related to smaller volume throughout the entire region. The association was concentrated in a particular set of subfields, giving us a more precise picture of how depression may relate to brain health during aging.” © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30360 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Alissa de Chassey A long-standing model of the hippocampus’s role in memory needs to be revised, according to a new preprint. For more than half a century, memory theories treated the CA3 region of the hippocampus as a uniform population of pyramidal neurons that form one broad recurrent, or autoassociative, network; the cells synapse onto each other and also send signals to the CA1 region. The network stores memories as synapses strengthen among coactivated cells, each encoding a different piece of the memory. And because of this architecture, a partial cue can reactivate a full memory, such as when the taste of a madeleine sparks a flood of childhood memories for the narrator of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” But it turns out that picture may be wrong. The CA3 instead comprises two distinct types of pyramidal neurons arranged in two layers, with different morphology, physiology and connectivity patterns, the preprint suggests. The findings were posted on bioRxiv in July. “These two cell types are very different, and one of them is totally breaking what the textbook would say,” says study investigator Jake Watson, a postdoctoral researcher in Peter Jonas’ lab at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. A single transcription factor, ST18, distinguishes the two populations, the study reveals: A set of superficial CA3 neurons that express ST18 forms a recurrent network as predicted by the classical model, and a deeper set, which does not express ST18, regulates the superficial one. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30359 - Posted: 08.05.2026

BY Christie Wilcox The vagus nerve snakes through the human body like an elaborate highway system, transmitting signals from the brain to the heart, lungs, and gastrointestinal system and back. But despite its critical role in regulating breathing, heart rate, and digestion, researchers have long struggled to map its anatomical structure—until now. Scientists have created the first comprehensive map of the human vagus nerve, tracing thousands of individual nerve fibers stretching from the lower brain stem to all major organs. The map—announced last week and detailed in a data set released earlier this year—might help scientists and doctors more precisely stimulate the nerve as a potential treatment for conditions such as epilepsy, stroke, and inflammatory diseases. Some existing therapies stimulate the vagus nerve with electrodes implanted in the chest or neck sending signals that can suppress seizure activity in the brain, for example, or blunt pain. But the vagus nerve is a staggeringly intricate network: After forking into a main left and right branch, it shoots out finer branches made up of fascicles—small bundles of nerve fibers—that project to organs throughout the body. That complexity makes it hard to isolate and target specific nerve fibers or to understand the effects of stimulating at a given point. “We place an electrode on the vagus nerve, and things happen. But why do these things happen in this certain way?” asks Stavros Zanos, the physician-scientist at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research who led the mapping project. “We just had no idea, and we looked at the literature, and it just wasn’t there.” To build a comprehensive map of the nerve structures, Zanos and his colleagues analyzed 30 sets of left and right vagus nerves dissected from 30 human cadavers. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Brain imaging; Stress
Link ID: 30358 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Alexandra Pattillo It was 2022, and Christina was running out of options. The Londoner, then age 34, was desperate to fix her anorexia nervosa, even as the disease consumed her. After six years of battling the disease, she’d tried various forms of behavioral therapy and months of in-patient care, but nothing stuck. At its worst, the disease was preventing her from sleeping and zapping so much energy that she was unable to climb her stairs or brush her teeth. She needed a radical fix. “You become your anorexia,” says Christina (a pseudonym to protect her privacy). “You have no life around it. You don’t laugh. You don’t smile. You don’t find joy in anything,” she recalls. Her relationships suffered, and she almost lost her job and house. Eventually, a frantic Google search for “cures for anorexia” alerted her to a clinical trial for the psychedelic psilocybin—an active ingredient in magic mushrooms—as a treatment for the disease. She signed up. “I genuinely believe, had I not done that trial, I would either be stuck in a hospital loop, or I wouldn't be here today,” she says. “It saved my life.” Life with an eating disorder can turn the mind and body into a prison. Intrusive, never-ending thought spirals drive compulsive behaviors such as binging, overexercising, purging and restrictive eating. Conventional psychiatric treatments, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy or antidepressants, work in only about half of patients. People with anorexia are more than 18 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population—the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30357 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Clarissa Brincat To avoid ending up with a less committed mate, some female birds listen for red flags in their suitor’s song. Male pied flycatchers change their song after mating, and females use these song features to tell if a male is already paired, researchers report July 1 in Ethology. The results are consistent with earlier research showing that most female pied flycatchers prefer to settle with an unmated male. “The female doesn’t really care about the song,” says behavioral ecologist Stephen Nowicki of Duke University, who was not involved in the work. “She cares because the song is a reliable indicator of some quality of the male,” including whether it already has a mate. Once its first mate lays eggs, a male pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) will often set up another nest several hundred meters away and court passing females. The stakes are high for the females, as a male splitting its time between two nests provides less help raising chicks. Ethologist Helene Lampe and her colleagues recorded 17 wild males twice — once while a male was a bachelor, and again after it had mated and moved to a second territory to woo another female. Using bioacoustics software, the team found that two things changed. The songs got shorter — from about two seconds to about 1.7 — and the male repeated itself less. “Usually, a male will cycle through his song syllables in an orderly manner — one or two syllables are usually repeated from one song to the next,” says Lampe, of the University of Oslo. “But when they become polyterritorial, they do it much less often.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30356 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By RJ Mackenzie LONDON — A protein marker of Alzheimer’s disease in the brain may also help diagnose cases of the brain condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, early data suggest. The condition, which is linked to repeated head trauma, currently can be identified only in autopsies. But measurements of an Alzheimer’s-associated protein, eMTBR-tau243, might one day bring testing to the living: In confirmed CTE cases, levels of the protein increased the more advanced the disease had been at death, researchers reported July 15 at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference. The data, which have yet to be peer-reviewed, suggest a path toward a first way of diagnosing CTE in living people, says Chihiro Sato, a neuroscientist at Washington University in St. Louis. While the results would need to be confirmed in a larger dataset, “we think there’s potential.” The ability to diagnose patients while they are still alive would provide clarity to patients about their well-being and be invaluable to getting them involved in future trials of any CTE treatments, says John Arena, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the research. Diagnosing CTE currently requires a careful examination of the brain after death, which has complicated efforts to identify how many people are affected by the condition. A 2018 study found that CTE-like damage affected 1 of 164 donated brains. But CTE is far more common in people repeatedly exposed to head trauma, like athletes in contact sports. In 2023, the Boston University CTE Center reported that CTE pathology was present in more than 90 percent of brains in a sample of 376 former NFL players. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Alzheimers
Link ID: 30355 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Rivka Galchen During his first year as a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, Ren Ng was hurriedly putting together a survey course on computer graphics. In the syllabus he had inherited, a full week had been devoted to the subject of color. Ng thought that was a bit much. “I’m, like, Come on. It’s R.G.B.,” he said, referring to the red, green, and blue subpixels that constitute anything you see on a screen—your cluttered desktop, a Sahara-desert screen saver, the stream of the Netherlands-Japan World Cup game. Ng started gathering slides that would cover the wavelengths of light, the biology of the human eye—the basics—“Blah, blah, blah,” he said. A colleague shared a slide that he thought might be useful. It included a minutely detailed photograph of a patch of retina, seen through a microscope, which was attributed to Austin Roorda, a professor of vision science and optometry just across campus. Roorda’s lab had helped develop technology that could map the layout of individual cone cells—those primarily responsible for perceiving color—and that, furthermore, could target a single cone cell with light. Eyes are constantly moving; cone cells are extremely small; how color is translated from the millions of cone cells to the mind remains pretty mysterious; this was awesome work. Roorda’s lab was using the new technology to explore eye disease and the mechanics of how we see. Ng had his own notion, though: he wondered if it could be used to see a color that had never been seen before. To understand what Ng had in mind requires knowing a bit of the blah, blah, blah of color vision. We humans experience three primary colors not because the world is fundamentally composed of three colors but because our retinas typically have three kinds of color-perceiving cone cells. L cone cells respond to the relatively longer wavelengths of visible light, M cone cells to the medium wavelengths, and S cone cells to the shorter ones. In effect, this means that L cells respond most strongly to red light, M to green, and S to blue. But when you look at your hand—or a blade of grass, or a clear blue sky, or a fire truck—it is always some mixture of L, M, and S cone cells that are being stimulated. Ng’s idea was to use the Roorda lab’s technology to stimulate an array of cone cells in a manner that would never occur naturally. Ng said, “I e-mailed him, basically, What would happen if you stimulated only the M cells? Would that be like the greenest green, or what?” Roorda did not reply. © 2026 Condé Nast.

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 30354 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Natalia Mesa Theoretical models of the brain often treat neurons as single, homogenous units. But dendrites can store information about the past and make predictions about the future independently of the cell body, according to a new study. “In the artificial-intelligence community, dendrites are underappreciated,” says Eilif Muller, associate professor of neurosciences at the University of Montreal, who was not involved in the study. “In this paper, and as we study dendrites more, we’re getting a glimpse into mechanisms that allow us to learn rapidly but stably.” Dendritic activity can dissociate from cell body activity, depending on an animal’s goal, the new work shows. The findings are the first in-vivo evidence of the long-standing theoretical prediction that a neuron’s dendrites play a separate role from cell bodies in neural computations. The study was published in Science earlier this month. “There’s been decades of studies on how dendrites function: Are they passive, or do they play a more active role in cognitive processes?” says study investigator Attila Losonczy, professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. Action potentials generated at the soma can backpropagate into the dendrites, making the two compartments’ activity hard to tease apart. Losonczy and his colleagues used ultrafast voltage imaging to record electrical activity in the dendrites of pyramidal place cells in the CA3 region of the hippocampus of mice as the animals moved around in a virtual environment and received a sip of water in certain locations; the place cells fire when a mouse is in a specific location in space. When the reward locations changed, dendrites retained information about the original sites. But when the entire virtual environment changed, dendrites were the first to encode new locations of rewards—the cell body caught up later. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30353 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Ailie McWhinnie On a research trip to Indonesia in 2007, Yosuke Kaifu saw for himself the skull of “Flo”—the skeletal remains first discovered 4 years earlier that heralded the existence of a diminutive human relative called Homo floresiensis. These so-called “Hobbits,” which stood about 1 meter tall, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until about 50,000 years ago. The University of Tokyo anthropologist was drawn to one anatomical peculiarity: The skull’s right side is slightly smooshed. Some researchers had previously attributed this abnormality to disease, others to distortion after burial. But when Kaifu showed it to a clinician back in Japan, he received a surprising response: It looked like a harmless condition known as deformational plagiocephaly, or flattening of the skull, that occurs today in about one in six babies. Usually, the skull rounds out over time, but in some cases, it can persist into adulthood. The condition arises because the human skull remains soft for the first months of life to allow for the enormous amount of brain growth that occurs after birth. Repeated pressure on one side can cause flattening, and because babies cannot hold up their own heads, they are prone to resting it on one side when put down. Such helplessness is thought to be a concession to babies’ brains being relatively underdeveloped at birth to allow them to fit through the birth canal. Kaifu reasoned that deformational plagiocephaly in the skulls of ancient hominins could be a good indicator that they, too, were helpless as infants. After examining hundreds of skulls, they conclude today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that at least two other lineages of humans shared this trait with us, suggesting it has deep evolutionary origins. “I thought it was a very ingenious study,” says Lia Betti, an anthropologist at University College London. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30352 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen Lindsay Clancy, a 35-year-old former nurse, is on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three young children in 2023. The details of the case are disturbing—according to court records, Clancy strangled her children, aged five years, three years and eight months, to death before she attempted to take her own life. Clancy has pled not guilty to the murder charges on the basis that she suffered from a mental health disorder called postpartum psychosis. During this episode, Clancy’s lawyers have said, she was convinced by voices in her head to kill her children and herself. The prosecution has argued the killings were premeditated. The ongoing, high-profile trial has thrust the topic of maternal mental health—and postpartum psychosis in particular—into the national spotlight. But behind the headlines, maternal mental health experts say the disorder is nuanced, understudied and, importantly, treatable. Postpartum psychosis is a rare and severe mental disorder that occurs in people who have given birth. It occurs after about one to two of every 1,000 live births, explains Khatiya Moon, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. It’s different from postpartum depression—the onset of depression following childbirth—which is more common and can affect around one in five to 10 people who have given birth. The symptoms of postpartum psychosis are “variable,” Moon says, but may include delusions, paranoia, purposeless or repetitive behavior, as well as hallucinations—hearing voices, seeing things or even feeling sensations on the skin that aren’t there. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30351 - Posted: 08.01.2026

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

By Emily Anthes One day last summer, a curious white-faced capuchin encountered a strange contraption in the forest. There, in the middle of the Taboga Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, sat a 15-inch touch screen, mounted in a wooden frame. As the monkey, an alpha male named Papi, began investigating — poking the device here, prodding it there — his fingers landed on the screen. Suddenly, a piece of dried banana dropped into a tray below the frame. Before long, Papi learned the basic rules of the device: touch the screen, get a dried banana slice. He also provided proof of concept for CapuchinAI, a new device designed to assess the cognitive abilities of monkeys in the wild. The testing apparatus, which the researchers described in a new paper, used A.I.-powered facial recognition software to detect capuchins in real time and record their responses to a simple learning task. The scientists hope that more sophisticated versions of the device, which they will begin testing in the coming weeks, will shed new light on primate evolution and intelligence, and answer questions that would be impossible to study in a lab, such as how a monkey’s smarts affect its success and survival. “If we really want to understand how primates make decisions, if we want to understand how they’re using these large brains that they evolved, we have to really put it in the context of the world in which they’re navigating,” said Marcela Benítez, a primatologist at Emory University and an author of the new paper, which was published in the American Journal of Primatology on Tuesday. “But that is a lot easier said than done.” Dr. Benítez has been studying the white-faced capuchins at Taboga for years, logging their behavior, recording their vocalizations and measuring their hormone levels. For the new study, she and her colleagues used images of some of these monkeys to train an artificial intelligence model to identify capuchins and distinguish them from the other animals roaming the forest. Then they built a portable testing station equipped with a touch screen, webcam and 3-D-printed food dispenser. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30349 - 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

By Emily Laber-Warren When sunlight hits an octopus, it can trigger a swift color change and instant camouflage, thanks to light-sensitive molecules embedded in the creature’s skin. When sunlight falls on a bird’s skull, similar compounds deep in the animal’s brain register changes in day length and help drive decisions on when to mate or migrate. Photosensitive proteins called opsins that respond instantly to sunlight can be found within and outside the eye in nearly every animal, and they govern not only vision but also a range of behaviors. Until about a quarter-century ago, though, the scientific consensus was that in humans, the only role for opsins was to help us see. But a surge of research over the past couple of decades has increasingly revealed that, like honeybees, zebra fish, rodents and other creatures, we harbor opsins that aren’t involved in vision, both in our eyes and throughout our bodies. These molecules appear to play a broad role in human biology, affecting mood, metabolism, sleep, thinking and social behavior. Since life’s beginnings, organisms on this sunbaked planet have had to evolve ways to protect against ultraviolet light, which can damage DNA. But it shouldn’t be surprising that, as dangerous as sunlight can be, most animals also rely on it to regulate key aspects of physiology, including body temperature, navigation, growth and sexual development. Across the animal kingdom, researchers are discovering that light-sensing opsins are involved in an array of biological processes beyond vision. These include camouflage; sensing seasonal changes via lengthening or shortening day lengths; synchronizing with the 24-hour cycle — as well as mood, healing and more.

Keyword: Vision; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 30347 - Posted: 07.29.2026