Neuroscience

The precuneus is involved in mental imagery concerning the self, episodic memory, and modeling other people’s views—all of which are main components of the DMN. Benedek and Jauk, psychologists specializing in research on creativity, note that “higher creativity is consistently associated with higher gray matter density in DMN regions, especially... See more

brain regions linked to attention and focus align more closely as the familiarity between dog and owner grows.

Learned helplessness, the failure to escape shock induced by uncontrollable aversive events, was discovered half a century ago. Seligman and Maier (1967) theorized that animals learned that outcomes were independent of their responses—that nothing they did mattered – and that this learning undermined trying to escape. The mechanism of learned... See more

Rather, in our brain’s pursuit to plan, survive, and achieve our goals, it has learned how to guess what the world is actually like based on incoming sensory data. Those predictions are always uncertain, at least to a degree, which is why the goal of predictive processing is often described as minimizing that uncertainty.

But an optimal relationship... See more