-
Attention unleashed
“Attention unleashed: Creative therapy for thoughtful transformation“ Various factors—motivation, interest, fatigue, and external stimuli—influence creative mental processes and attention control (AC). Creative thinking (CT) relies on AC and involves coordinated neural networks and pathways. The cognitive function of AC requires the capacity to direct attention toward distinct features of the environment or internal thoughts. Such…
-
A Day in the Life …
A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificatorClear message (with some humor) from the Norwegian Consumer Council…Helping to define the “enshittification” The “real” discussion and content is available on this website Enjoy the message.
-
Why AI Agents ….
“Why AI Agents are either the best or worst thing we’ve ever built” Hannah Fry: I built an AI agent. She opened a shop selling novelty mugs, emailed a journalist without being asked, and then leaked our passwords to a total stranger. AI agents don’t just answer questions – they act. They can browse the…
-
Mathematical and Musical Abilities
“Are Mathematical and Musical Abilities Related Beyond Intelligence?” Numerous studies have aimed to improve mathematical achievement via musical interventions because it is argued that music and mathematics draw on related representations and similar skills. However, findings on their effectiveness are inconclusive. This might be because studies neglect to investigate the cognitive mechanisms that might link…
-
The body does not keep the score
“The body does not keep the score: trauma, predictive coding, and the restoration of metastability” For nearly a decade, the idea that “the body keeps the score” has shaped public and clinical understanding of trauma. It is an enticing metaphor—implying that experience is literally inscribed in flesh, that the body bears the scars of what…
-
Top-down attention shifts event boundaries
“Top-down attention shifts behavioral and neural event boundaries in narratives with overlapping event scripts” • Default mode regions represent schematic event scripts during narrative perception • Attending to an event script impacts behavioral event segmentation and memory • Neural dynamics in the mPFC reflect the event structure of an attended script Understanding and remembering the…
-
The role of context in continuity and segmentation
“The role of context in continuity and segmentation” Human experience intertwines continuity, the seamless flow of events, with segmentation, the spontaneous partitioning of experience into discrete units. Despite their cognitive significance, it is unclear whether these processes operate independently or share a common mechanism. Here we explored this question by examining the link between serial…
-
Beyond Belief
“Beyond Belief: How Evidence Shows What Really Works” The remarkable story of the global movement championing the idea that evidence, not opinions, should guide our decisions. Published by Princeton University Press, April 2026. Today, more and more people around the globe are using scientific evidence to figure out what works—in health, government and business as…
-
Athletes and other Animals
“Embodied decision making in athletes and other animals” Humans and other animals continuously make embodied decisions about ongoing or pending courses of action. Examples of embodied decisions include a hunting lioness’s decision of which gazelle to chase and a soccer player’s decision of which teammate to pass the ball to. The study of embodied decisions has recently…
-
Dennett’s Real Patterns
“Dennett’s Real Patterns in Science and Nature” How the concept of a pattern, as understood in information science and applied in contemporary AI, can address deep questions in science and philosophy. The explosive growth of AI and machine learning in recent decades is predicated on the recognition and exploitation of patterns in data. Of course,…
-
Persisting Human–AI Gap in Visual Creativity
“Stable Diffusion Models Reveal a Persisting Human–AI Gap in Visual Creativity“ While recent research suggests Large Language Models match human creative performance in divergent thinking tasks, visual creativity remains underexplored. This study compared image generation in human participants (Visual Artists and Non-Artists) and using an image-generation AI model (two prompting conditions with varying human input:…
-
Social Observations, Decisions, Explore/Exploit
“Observational learning of exploration-exploitation strategies in bandit tasks” In decision-making scenarios, individuals often face the challenge of balancing between exploring new options and exploiting known ones—a dynamic known as the exploration-exploitation trade-off. In such situations, people frequently have the opportunity to observe others’ actions. Yet little is known about when, how, and from whom individuals…
-
From reductionism to realism
“From reductionism to realism: holistic mathematical modelling for complex biological systems” At its core, the physics paradigm adopts a reductionist approach, aiming to understand fundamental phenomena by decomposing them into simpler, elementary processes. While this strategy has been tremendously successful in physics, it has often fallen short in addressing fundamental questions in the biological sciences.…
-
Affective State as a central component to environmental changes
“Considering affective state as a central component of the response of animals to environmental changes” Current environmental changes are often considered as negatively impacting the affective state of animals. Yet, the interplay betweenenvironmental conditions and affective state should rather be viewed as a reciprocal and dynamic relationship, as variation in affective state likely determines how…
-
Music as a scientific metaphor for mind and brain
“Music as a scientific metaphor for mind and brain” Metaphors have long played multiple roles in conceptualizing the mind and brain, guiding the development and refinement of theoretical models and empirical questions. Early analogies (comparing the brain to hydraulic systems, telephone exchanges, factories, or libraries) offered shortcuts to understanding aspects of cognition, memory, and brain…
-
Active Construction of Past Episodes
“The active construction of past episodes” Episodic memories – declarative memories of past events, characterized by rich spatiotemporal context – play a central role in guiding perception and behaviour. Here, we advance a model that integrates episodic memories within the active inference framework. We describe how episodic memories are incorporated into the generative models used…
-
MOPGA: Multidisciplinary science
“Multidisciplinary science funding is more than ever a planetary priority: Reflections from the Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program” Global change poses “wicked problems” that have become ever more complex, pervasive, and damaging. Developing innovative solutions increasingly require diverse research approaches. The Franco-German Make Our Planet Great Again (MOPGA) program was designed to create a unique…
-
Wise Machines
“Imagining and building wise machines: the centrality of AI metacognition” Although artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly smart, its wisdom has not kept pace. In this opinion article, we examine what is known about human wisdom and sketch a vision of its AI counterpart. We introduce human wisdom as strategies for solving intractable problems—those outside…
Surtil : 