Neuroscience

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

The next time you’re driving home in a car or sitting down to enjoy a meal, spare some thought for the ways in which the neurochemical soup in your brain mimics your gut: helping you to digest complex patterns of information as you navigate the intricacies of your daily life.

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

Together, wanting and liking encourage us to pursue rewards. But these sensations can also stand alone, creating situations where you might know that you enjoy something but don’t want to go after it, or where you might have a strong desire for something that you don’t get much pleasure from.