Neuroscience

When the mind searches for the future, it sees the past.

one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe... See more

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

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it

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

Research published in Scientific Reports suggests how you perceive the passage of time is related to the amount of new perceptual information you absorb. When you're young, so many things seem new, and your brain has more to process. That makes the passage of time feel longer; as you get older, relatively little seems new, which means your brain... See more