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cognitive science

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Neuroscientist Anil Seth in his darkened laboratory at the University of Sussex.
Q&A

Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy

By Dan Falk
September 30, 2021
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How does consciousness arise in mere flesh and blood? To the neuroscientist Anil Seth, our organic bodies are the key to the experience.

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.

An illustration of a human brain against “pink noise” static.
neuroscience

Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries

By Elizabeth Landau
February 8, 2021
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By digging out signals hidden within the brain’s electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more.

Art for "How the Brain Links Gestures, Perception and Meaning"
cognitive science

How the Brain Links Gestures, Perception and Meaning

By Raleigh McElvery
March 25, 2019
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Neuroscience has found that gestures are not merely important as tools of expression but as guides of cognition and perception.

Art for "How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past"
neuroscience

How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past

By Jordana Cepelewicz
February 12, 2019
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The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events.

Art for "The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces"
neuroscience

The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces

By Jordana Cepelewicz
January 14, 2019
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Emerging evidence suggests that the brain encodes abstract knowledge in the same way that it represents positions in space, which hints at a more universal theory of cognition.

Art for "To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future"
neuroscience

To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future

By Jordana Cepelewicz
July 10, 2018
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A controversial theory suggests that perception, motor control, memory and other brain functions all depend on comparisons between ongoing actual experiences and the brain’s modeled expectations.

Photo of Physarum Polycephalum
cognitive science

Slime Molds Remember — but Do They Learn?

By Katia Moskvitch
July 9, 2018
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Evidence mounts that organisms without nervous systems can in some sense learn and solve problems, but researchers disagree about whether this is “primitive cognition.”

Is a spiderweb part of the animal’s mind?
cognitive science

The Thoughts of a Spiderweb

By Joshua Sokol
May 23, 2017
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Spiders appear to offload cognitive tasks to their webs, making them one of a number of species with a mind that isn’t fully confined within the head.


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