Category: Complexity
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Nature on the balance sheet …
“Putting nature on the balance sheet: how to account for the ecological costs of our actions” Economists should consider forests and wetlands as well as factories and farms. A book review of “On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us“, Partha Dasgupta (2025) On Natural Capital recaps the roaring economic advances of the past 75…
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Stubborn Goals: the adaptive value
“The adaptive value of stubborn goals” Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise…
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Harmony in the brain
“Harmony in the brain: A narrative review on the shared neural substrates of emotion regulation and creativity” The contribution of creativity in overall well-being through regulating emotions has sparkled research interest in employing artistic interventions recently for the improvement of mental health. Although the behavioural links between emotion regulation and creativity have been established, the neural networks reflecting…
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End GDP mania
“End GDP mania: how the world should really measure prosperity” Last week’s United Nations General Assembly, held in New York City, generated no shortage of headlines. But one notable policy initiative from the world body was not discussed by world leaders when it should have been. UN secretary-general António Guterres has put together a high-level…
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Critical Thinking for Medicine—Moving Beyond Illness Scripts
“Critical Thinking for 21st-CenturyMedicine—Moving Beyond Illness Scripts” Clinical Reasoning for 21st-Century Medicine: Optimal clinical reasoning will involve an appropriate balance betweenillness scripts and pathophysiological reasoning. In our view, medical education has historically overemphasized the former—to which learners are predisposed even without explicit teaching— and underemphasized the latter. The risks of this historical approach will become…
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Computational Framework for cognitive biology
“Toward a computational framework for cognitive biology: Unifying approaches from cognitive neuroscience and comparative cognition” Progress in understanding cognition requires a quantitative, theoretical framework, grounded in the other natural sciences and able to bridge between implementational, algorithmic and computational levels of explanation. This review article reviews recent results in neuroscience and cognitive biology that, when combined, provide key components…
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Brain-body physiology
“Brain-body physiology: Local, reflex, and central communication” Behavior is tightly synchronized with bodily physiology. Internal needs from the body drive behavior selection, while optimal behavior performance requires a coordinated physiological response. Internal state is dynamically represented by the nervous system to influence mood and emotion, and body-brain signals also direct responses to external sensory cues,…
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Divergent Perception: Framing Creative Cognition
“Divergent Perception: Framing Creative Cognition Through the Lens of Sensory Flexibility” “Savoir regarder est un moyen d’inventer.” Salvador Dali. Creativity is a cornerstone of human evolution and is typically defined as the multifaceted ability to produce novel and useful artifacts. Although much research has focused on divergent thinking, growing evidence underscores the importance of perceptual…
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Towards embodied intelligence
“Intelligent soft matter: towards embodied intelligence” Intelligent soft matter lies at the intersection of materials science, physics, and cognitive science, promising to change how we design and interact with materials. This transformative field aims to create materials with life-like capabilities, such as perception, learning, memory, and adaptive behavior. Unlike traditional materials, which typically perform static…
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Known and Unknown Biases
“Known and Unknown Biases: A Framework for Contextualising and Identifying Bias in Animal Behaviour Research“ (This article discusses the bias in animal behaviour research, but – as known to most readers, I hope – humanes too are members of the animal kingdom 🙂 Biases in animal behaviour research are inevitable consequences of our societal and…
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Climate Change, A Geoscience Perspective
Climate Change, A Geoscience Perspective This open access book on climate change assesses past climatic change from a geoscience perspective and directly and effectively addresses common misconceptions on climate and climate change. A geoscience perspective on the multiple causes, rates, and consequences of climate change is essential context to assess modern climate change and our…
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The Idealized Mind
The Idealized Mind: From Model-Based Science to Cognitive Science.The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding and support from MIT Press Direct to Open A defense of scientific realism based on the role of idealization in the cognitive sciences. We study nature, including the mind and brain, by building scientific models.…
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Horizon Scanning
EU policy lab released a set of “signal cards“. More information available at “In the mood for the future with Horizon Scanning Cards“ The Signal Cards come out of the ESPAS Horizon Scanning activity, in which we present and analyse emerging trends, technologies or generally signs of new which we identified through the horizon scanning…
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Responsible Modeling
Responsible modelling and the ethics of mathematics for decision support Mathematical models are used to inform decisions across many sectors including climate change, finance, and epidemics. But models are not perfect representations of the real world – they are partial, uncertain and often biased. What, then, does responsible modelling look like? And how can we…
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Complexity data science
“Complexity data science: A spin-off from digital twins “ Digital twins offer a new and exciting framework that has recently attracted significant interest in fields such as oncology, immunology, and cardiology. The basic idea of a digital twin is to combine simulation and learning to create a virtual model of a physical object. In this paper,…
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misguidedly radical ideas?
“Is bad philosophy holding back physics?“ Carlo Rovelli states:“My hunch is that it is at least partly because physicists are bad philosophers. Scientists’ opinions, whether they realize it or not (and whether they like it or not), are imbued with philosophy. And many of my colleagues — especially those who argue that philosophy is irrelevant…
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