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?
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.
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.
Neurowetenschap kan de dood niet volledig verklaren, maar ze laat wel zien dat sterven geen abrupt einde is.
The brain is an impressively rapid forecaster, completing sentences before they finish, as if informed by a crystal ball. Similar to language models like GPT, it constantly predicts words to come and is sensitive to errors.
Worrying, overthinking, replaying things that happened in the past. Your thoughts keep spinning around – sometimes useful, but they can also trap you in a negative, recurring spiral. Researchers at the Donders Institute are trying to find out how we can break free from such streams of thought. Does mindfulness help? Or is simple distraction enough?
It was only halfway through the twentieth century that autism was given a clear name and definition. Yet doctors at that time already noticed that some autistic children also had epileptic seizures. Today we know that this connection is no coincidence: autism and epilepsy have more in common than once thought.
It is time to rethink our approach to mental health treatment. As depression rates rise
If you pause to consider all the things you do in a single day, you seldom realise how much understanding of physics it requires—even more so when we do not pause. Yet you wouldn’t get quite far with pouring coffee into your mug, interlacing a chain lock through your bike, or using a zebra crossing without some understanding of the natural laws that govern the world. How does your brain understand the physical world so well, but its formulas so poorly?
Think of an apple. What do you “see” in your mind’s “eye”? A vivid image