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Anil Seth Finds Consciousness in Life’s Push Against Entropy
How does consciousness arise in mere flesh and blood? To the neuroscientist Anil Seth, our organic bodies are the key to the experience.
Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go?
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.
Brain’s ‘Background Noise’ May Hold Clues to Persistent Mysteries
By digging out signals hidden within the brain’s electrical chatter, scientists are getting new insights into sleep, aging and more.
How the Brain Links Gestures, Perception and Meaning
Neuroscience has found that gestures are not merely important as tools of expression but as guides of cognition and perception.
How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past
The brain can’t directly encode the passage of time, but recent work hints at a workaround for putting timestamps on memories of events.
The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces
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.
To Make Sense of the Present, Brains May Predict the Future
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.
Slime Molds Remember — but Do They Learn?
Evidence mounts that organisms without nervous systems can in some sense learn and solve problems, but researchers disagree about whether this is “primitive cognition.”
The Thoughts of a Spiderweb
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.