Research on how people think, feel, remember, and decide. Coverage draws on psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral science.
Across three online experiments with 1,563 people, reading a careless repairman’s private thoughts rather than his spoken apology raised forgiveness only when he was clearly at fault, and the gains were small.
Three randomized online experiments with 1,222 participants found that people who lost a chatbot’s help solved fewer fraction and reading problems than people who never had it. Direct-answer users fared worst, though that comparison was not randomized.
In one 16-year-old with highly superior autobiographical memory, unbidden memories of his past made up 87% of his stray thoughts in a dull lab task, against 39% in 36 comparison adults. One case cannot say why.
Mice given a synthetic cannabinoid froze more and avoided a predator odor analog, and blocking output from fear-region somatostatin neurons prevented the avoidance boost. Whether any of this explains human cannabis anxiety is untested.
Georgetown and University of Washington researchers found that AI video summaries omitted the crash itself in 95% of test cases, and one misleading detail was enough to warp what people remembered from an accident they had watched firsthand.
Dog brains favor consonants when tracking words in speech, as people’s do, and wild orangutan infants that watched and tried more ended up with broader diets. Two Science papers, one shared idea about learning.
A three-variable simulation of the primary visual cortex settled from chaotic activity into a steady rhythm once two feedback loops were added. The chaos never left the math, which hints that stable seeing is something the brain keeps working at.
A screen of 74 genes in planarian flatworms found 10 needed to rebuild dopamine-producing neurons, work the authors say could improve stem cell therapies for brain injury or disease, though nothing has been tested beyond worms.
Stanford researchers traced two separate progenitor cells in mouse embryos, one wiring up the thinking brain and the other the life support system of breathing and heartbeat, explaining why hindbrain neurons have been nearly impossible to grow in a lab.
Stanford scientists genetically stripped mouse pups of most of their cortex, then filled the gap with human stem cell derived brain tissue that wired into the mouse’s nervous system and reached its spinal cord.
Stevens Neuroimaging Institute researchers built a brain scan measure that lines up blood flow with cell density layer by layer, revealing regions whose mitochondria run at higher capacity, a clue that could eventually help flag disease.
Off Australia’s Gold Coast, a female humpback spent hours beside a newborn that never drew breath, repeatedly nudging it but never lifting the body toward the surface.