Mary Martin

recent research offers a reassuring perspective—that AI-delivered therapeutic interventions have reached a level of sophistication such that they’re indistinguishable from human-written therapeutic responses.

While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in... See more

cognition is the result of information processing distributed across all cellular systems in the body, including the brain, which is, in our view, (part of) the body. Speaking about brain-body-environment interactions in constituting cognition may be misleading because it tacitly inherits the distinction between mind (brain) and body. Cognitive... See more

The brain evaluates the images it is processing against a “reality threshold.” If the signal passes the threshold, the brain thinks it’s real; if it doesn’t, the brain thinks it’s imagined.

Empathy, or feeling with another, is not the same as compassion, or feeling for another. In empathy, we suffer with the other or share their joy or other emotions—we feel what they feel. Compassion, by comparison, involves care and concern for the person who suffers, and comes with a strong motivation to help and feelings of warmth and love. We... See more

For instance, studies on meditators have shown that their somatosensory perception is more sensitive to subtle internal sensations, potentially leading to both enhanced detection of bodily signals and misinterpretation of these signals (Mylius et al., 2023).

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

Are mental health awareness efforts contributing to the rise in reported mental health problems? A call to test the prevalence inflation hypothesis