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cognition

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An illustration that shows words and music from an opera singer going into a listener’s brain.
neuroscience

The Brain Processes Speech in Parallel With Other Sounds

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 21, 2021
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Scientists thought that the brain’s hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on.

Photo of rat climbing through a lattice of thin rods.
neuroscience

How Animals Map 3D Spaces Surprises Brain Researchers

By Jordana Cepelewicz
October 14, 2021
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When animals move through 3D spaces, the neat system of grid cell activity they use for navigating on flat surfaces gets more disorderly. That has implications for some ideas about memory and other processes.

An artist’s conception of the ways that functional capacities have been mapped to regions of the brain.
neuroscience

The Brain Doesn’t Think the Way You Think It Does

By Jordana Cepelewicz
August 24, 2021
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Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are emerging.

Photo of crows.
cognitive science

Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?

By Jordana Cepelewicz
August 9, 2021
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Crows recently demonstrated an understanding of the concept of zero. It’s only the latest evidence of animals’ talents for numerical abstraction — which may still differ from our own grasp of numbers.

A drawing of a mouse, with lines representing sensory data rotating 90 degrees to become lines of memory data.
neuroscience

The Brain ‘Rotates’ Memories to Save Them From New Sensations

By Jordana Cepelewicz
April 15, 2021
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Some populations of neurons simultaneously process sensations and memories. New work shows how the brain rotates those representations to prevent interference.

Animation of a neuron that periodically alters its responses to stimuli when it is reset into a new state by another input.
neural networks

Artificial Neural Nets Finally Yield Clues to How Brains Learn

By Anil Ananthaswamy
February 18, 2021
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The learning algorithm that enables the runaway success of deep neural networks doesn’t work in biological brains, but researchers are finding alternatives that could.

Looping video of illustrated clocks stretching in different directions.
Abstractions blog

Reasons Revealed for the Brain’s Elastic Sense of Time

By Jordana Cepelewicz
September 24, 2020
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New research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations and neural fatigue.

Simple line drawing of a beating human heart.
Abstractions blog

How Your Heart Influences What You Perceive and Fear

By Jordana Cepelewicz
July 6, 2020
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The heartbeat and other bodily processes play a surprising role in shaping perception and cognition.

Photo of Scarlett Howard, a researcher at the University of Toulouse, working with honeybees
Q&A

Secrets of Math From the Bee Whisperer

By Susan D'Agostino
January 22, 2020
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As Scarlett Howard taught honeybees to do arithmetic, they showed her how fundamental numbers might be to all brains.


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