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Cognition

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How Smell Guides Our Inner World

July 3, 2025

A better understanding of human smell is emerging as scientists interrogate its fundamental elements: the odor molecules that enter your nose and the individual neurons that translate them into perception in your brain.

How Much Energy Does It Take To Think?

June 4, 2025

Studies of neural metabolism reveal our brain’s effort to keep us alive and the evolutionary constraints that sculpted our most complex organ.

AI Is Nothing Like a Brain, and That’s OK

April 30, 2025

The brain’s astounding cellular diversity and networked complexity could show how to make AI better.

Intelligence Evolved at Least Twice in Vertebrate Animals

April 7, 2025

Complex neural pathways likely arose independently in birds and mammals, suggesting that vertebrates evolved intelligence multiple times.

How the Human Brain Contends With the Strangeness of Zero

October 18, 2024

Zero, which was invented late in history, is special among numbers. New studies are uncovering how the brain creates something out of nothing.

What Happens in a Mind That Can’t ‘See’ Mental Images

August 1, 2024

Neuroscience research into people with aphantasia, who don’t experience mental imagery, is revealing how imagination works and demonstrating the sweeping variety in our subjective experiences.

Can Psychedelics Improve Mental Health?

June 6, 2024

Research suggests that psychedelic drugs can reopen critical periods of brain development to create opportunities for re-learning and psychological healing. In this episode, co-host Janna Levin speaks with Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist studying the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances.

The Social Benefits of Getting Our Brains in Sync

March 28, 2024

Our brain waves can align when we work and play closely together. The phenomenon, known as interbrain synchrony, suggests that collaboration is biological.

What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything

February 5, 2024

When your mind is wandering, your brain’s “default mode” network is active. Its discovery 20 years ago inspired a raft of research into networks of brain regions and how they interact with each other.

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