cognition

Here's something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution. That's the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by an MIT researcher, showing that chess players…

Studying human conversations isn’t a simple challenge. For instance, when humans start to talk to one another in a conversation, they coordinate their speech very tightly—people very rarely…

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…

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…

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, you must be wearing cheetah prints and a…

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 lights ahead. Through…

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 tips that…

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, the US Food and Drug…

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…

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…