TL;DR: We can propose “consciousness tests” only if we imply the existence of a task that only a genuinely conscious system can solve. Therefore, if we invent an internally uncontradictive solution to that task, we’ll create consciousness.I won’t waste my – and yours – time arguing for the importance of consciousness research. You already know it. Everything we know is known through the lens of conscious experience. Nor will I dwell on the familiar difficulties: the hard problem, the explanat... Read more ›
Can meditation really help conditions like migraine, anxiety, insomnia, chronic pain, memory problems, and stroke recovery? Modern neuroscience increasingly says yes. Research shows that meditation can reshape brain networks, reduce stress hormones, improve sleep, enhance cognitive function, and promote neuroplasticity. In this article, Dr. Shubhankar Mishra explores how an ancient spiritual practice is emerging as a powerful tool for neurological wellness, bridging the gap between modern sci... Read more ›
A dopamine menu can help provide small, regular boosts of motivation and pleasure throughout the day Read more ›
Schizophrenia’s effects are often discussed in metaphors. What is it like to live with those metaphors? Read more ›
Multimodal neuroimaging, integrating functional connectivity from fMRI and structural connectivity from DTI, enables non-invasive analysis of brain networks using graph neural networks. However, demographic factors such as age and sex systematically confound the relationship between brain connectivity and clinical outcomes, causing GNNs to exploit spurious shortcuts rather than learning causally invariant representations. While recent causal GNN... Read more ›
What do LLMs make of leading arguments in the Philosophy of Mind? Read more ›
A Quotient Metric Framework for Understanding and Improving Neural Representations Read more ›
To transmit excitatory signals, nerve cells mostly use glutamate as a neurotransmitter. To detect these transmitter signals, the cells can rely on a whole repertoire of receptors with different signaling properties. Researchers at the Chair of Cellular Neurobiology, led by Professor Andreas Reiner at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany, together with collaboration partners in New York (Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Weill Cornell Medicine), investigated the function of a specific glut... Read more ›
Blog posts here typically start with research and then consider classroom application. Today’s post — more speculative than most — begins with a concept and then moves to thinking aloud. In brief: I want to explore the concept of “checking for understanding,” and propose a new category of classroom moves that should precede such checks. […] Read more ›
Dr. David Puder sits down with psychopharmacology expert Dr. Michael Cummings and Dr. Blaire Heath to discuss Side Effect Mastery in Psychopharmacology. This episode dives deep into the Rawlings–Thompson A-F Classification system for understanding and managing medication side effects, emphasizing low and slow titration strategies to improve tolerability and patient outcomes. They discuss practical, real-world approaches to common challenges, including orthostatic hypotension, excessive sweati... Read more ›
Frontiers Frontiers | Exercise benefits in metabolism on cardiovascular disease Low physical activity (PA) is an independent predictor of cardiovascular disease. Exercise, as a non-pharmacological intervention for prevention and treatmen... chatGPT(5.5 paid) Guo et al. 2026, “Exercise benefits in metabolism on cardiovascular disease,” Frontiers in Cardiovascular Medicine. This is a narrative review, not a primary experimental paper. It argues that exercise protects against cardiovascular dise... Read more ›
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume 123, Issue 25, June 2026. SignificanceHow oxytocin modulates the brain processes by which hierarchical relationships are learned and used to infer unobserved relationships remains unclear. Here, we identify the neurocomputational mechanisms engaged when learning rank relationships ... Read more ›
The study reveals that these vortex-like waves are driven by a unique, circular "merry-go-round" architectural layout of neurons in the sensory cortex. Read more ›
Meg was married to a man but had fantasised having sex with women for years. When she met Jess, her knees buckled• I’d spent so many years visualising having sex with a woman Read more ›
Speech motor adaptation has been explained either by sensory prediction error learning or by integrating corrective motor commands, but the mechanism remains debated. This study shows that speakers adapt to auditory prediction errors even without executed movements, suggesting that prediction errors, rather than corrective motor commands, drive audiomotor adaptation in speech. Read more ›
The Bures--Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three--sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton--De... Read more ›
Dr. Po Wang is a board-certified psychiatrist, who specializes in the treatment of Bipolar Disorders. Read more ›
Understanding how humans select, rehearse, and transform internal representations ‘in mind’ is vital. Gaining access to these latent working-memory processes, however, is not trivial. Here, I review the recent discovery that working-memory processes ‘leak’ into spatial biases in minuscule eye movements known as microsaccades. I first unpack this central finding and position it alongside complementary findings from the literature on attention, memory, and eye movements. Next, I adopt a pragmat... Read more ›
Intracortical brain-computer interfaces suffer from day-to-day neural signal shifts that degrade pretrained decoders. Existing unsupervised adaptation methods rely on deep recurrent or adversarial architectures that are too computationally expensive for implantable hardware. We propose Membrane Potential Alignment (MPA), a test-time adaptation method for spiking neural networks that realigns a pretrained decoder to shifted recordings by only mat... Read more ›