You see a car – wait… it’s not just a car. It’s red, it has a particular shape, and it’s moving fast. You hear the engine as it races past you. Maybe you even catch the smell of exhaust. Your amazing brain is able to combine all these different signals into a single red car, but how does it do that?
You’re walking home at night and think you see someone behind you, but when you turn around, no one’s there. Moments like this raise a question: how does your brain tell what’s real and what you’re imagining? Evidence suggests the answer may be surprisingly simple: the brain listens to the “volume” of its own signals. When internal thoughts become strong enough, they can briefly fool the mind into treating imagination as reality.
Why does one person feel completely exhausted after being in a busy place, while another barely notices it? Why is one person deeply moved by a sad movie or quick to notice small details, while another hardly reacts? According to researchers, this has to do with how our brain processes sensory input. It can be explained with the ideas of predictive processing.
What if we encounter aliens without neurons and brains like ours? How will we be able to say how intelligent they are? Beyond cognitive science, how else can we define intelligence?
Being highly sensitive and having a high level of sensation-seeking may feel like living life with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake – but this paradox can be your greatest strength. When you accept and respect both sides, highly sensitive sensation seekers can truly thrive.
Look in a mirror. The face you see feels completely like your own. You rarely question it. But what if your brain could be convinced that another face also belongs to you?
When thinking about the necessities for a safe childhood, we often think of visible and measurable things: low crime, stable housing, sufficient income. A new study shows how something more subtle is just as important: how safe a child feels. This subjective experience is not only psychologically relevant, but also visible in the brain.
Can you picture an apple? If the answer is no, you might have aphantasia. New research is shedding new light on to the purpose of visual imagination, helping us understand empathy, memory, and maybe even consciousness itself.
Ramadan is a holy month in Islam, focused on introspection. A key part is fasting between sunrise and sunset. What effect does this have on the brain? Esther Aarts, scientist and research program leader in Nutrition & Cognition, explains.
Learning something new can make old knowledge feel harder to reach, but that doesn’t mean your brain is running out of space.
How your brain turns fragments into a film 
Did I really see that? 
More than sensitive: the brain of highly sensitive people is tuned differently 
