brains and behavior

With a cutoff of five, I would be choosing a random option for about one in every 20 decisions I made with my algorithm. I picked five as the cutoff because…

Philosophers have grappled with the nature of evil for thousands of years, but these days, immorality can feel like a solved problem. Take the case of Bryan…

Studying human conversations isn’t a simple challenge. For instance, when humans start to talk to one another in a conversation, they coordinate their speech…

A major goal of the field of neuroprosthetics has focused on improving the lives of paralyzed patients by restoring their lost real-world abilities. One…

If the bars look a bit emptier this month, it may be because more people are trading happy hour for Dry January.The tradition, in which people abstain from…

Memory and perception seem like entirely distinct experiences, and neuroscientists used to be confident that the brain produced them differently, too. But in…

In June 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine became convinced that the AI program he’d been working on—LaMDA—had developed not only intelligence but…

If you think your dog loves you, you’re a fool. If you feel a kinship with a tree, you’re a hippie. And if you over-empathize with a wild animal, you must be…

A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive…

The most widely tested brain implant is the Utah array—a hard silicon square with 100 tiny protruding needles. Each about a millimeter long, the needles have…