Tag: #ProblemSolvingMind
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Your brain on nature
“Your brain on nature: A scoping review of the neuroscience of nature exposure” The relationship between natural environments and human cognition has gathered increasing attention across disciplines, including neuroscience, environmental psychology, and public health. An expanding body of empirical evidence supports the notion that exposure to nature consistently promotes psychological and physiological well-being. However, our…
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Delusion as embodied emotion
“Delusion as embodied emotion: a qualitatively driven, multimethod study of first-episode psychosis in the UK” Delusions in psychosis involve complex and dynamic experiential, affective, cognitive, behavioural, and interpersonal alterations. Their pattern of emergence during the early stages of illness remains poorly understood and the origin of their thematic content unclear. Phenomenological accounts have emphasised alterations…
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Intuitive insight: Fast associative processes drive sound creative thinking
“Intuitive insight: Fast associative processes drive sound creative thinking” Convergent thinking, the ability to find a single optimal solution to a well-defined problem, is considered a core component of creativity, and is often assumed to rely on controlled, deliberative processes. We tested this assumption using the Compound Remote Associates (CRA) test, where participants have to…
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Switching, fast and slow
“Switching, fast and slow: Deciphering the dynamics of memory search, its brain connectivity patterns, and its role in creativity “ Creative ideas emerge from the process of searching and combining concepts in memory, involving both associative and controlled mechanisms. How these processes unfold during memory search and relate to creativity remains unclear. We explored the neurocognitive…
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Explore 2025 with Leif Penguinson
“Explore 2025 with Leif Penguinson” Around the world in 48 penguin puzzles! Can you spot the penguin in every game this year? For five years now, Briefing readers have eagerly awaited Fridays for a chance to put their penguin-hunting skills to the test. Each week, Leif Penguinson, a Rockhopper penguin, travels to scientifically interesting (and…
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The Universe Learning Itself
“The Universe Learning Itself: On the Evolution of Dynamics from theBig Bang to Machine Intelligence” We develop a unified, dynamical-systems narrative of the universe that traces a continuous chain of structure formation from the Big Bang to contemporary human societies and their artificial learning systems. Rather than treating cosmology, astrophysics, geophysics, biology, cognition, and machine…
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Why collective behavioursself-organize to criticality
“Why collective behaviours self-organize to criticality: a primer on information-theoretic and thermodynamic utility measures” Collective behaviours are frequently observed to self‑organize to criticality. Existing proposals to explain these phenomena are fragmented across disciplines and only partially answer the question. This primer compares the underlying, intrinsic, utilities that may explain the self‑organization of collective behaviours near…
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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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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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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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Plasticity: A network theory
“Plasticity in mental health: A network theory“ Plasticity is the ability to modify brain and behavior, ultimately promoting an amplification of the impact of the context on the individual’s mental health. Thus, plasticity is not beneficial per se but its value depends on contextual factors, such as the quality of the living environment. High plasticity is…
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Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience
“Top-down and bottom-up neuroscience: overcoming the clash of research cultures“ As scientists, we want solid answers, but we also want to answer questions that matter. Yet, the brain’s complexity forces trade-offs between these desiderata, bringing about two distinct research approaches in neuroscience that we describe as ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’. Bottom-up neuroscience The bottom-up research culture…
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Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy
I found this nice discours on an interesting topic, related with individual challlenges, AI and related tools appearing in this relation. Therapy That Isn’t Psychotherapy by Steven Reidbord Reducing the problem to a merely external one leads to therapy that resembles political advocacy; therapy that prizes agreement (“validation”) over all else; therapy that absolves the patient…
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De Wilde Ziel
De Wilde Ziel – Leven met de natuur als leraar: herontdek je wilde kant.Craig Foster, 2025 (origilele titel: “Amphibious Soul”) We zaten op een rots en ik vertelde Tom verhalen over mijn jeugd, over onze houten bungalow en over de nacht van de grote overstroming. Ik vertelde hem over het flesje met brieven en buitenlands…
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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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Top-down influences
“Top-down influences on the perception of emotional stimuli” (also available as PDF) The ability to quickly and accurately perceive external emotional stimuli — events in the environment that evoke changes in feelings, physiology and behaviour — is vital for adaptive social interactions and effective decision making in everyday life. Contemporary theories of emotional perception emphasize the influence of top-down…
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The power of mathematical models for better policy decisions
“Harnessing the power of mathematical models for better policy decisions” sets out four practical recommendations to help policymakers across a wide range of policy areas effectively capitalise on, and sidestep pitfalls of, using mathematical models for decision-making. Decision-makers are often keen to “follow the science” in highly-charged contexts such as climate policy, pandemic response, economic…
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Greatness Cannot Be Planned
Why does modern life revolve around objectives? From how science is funded, to improving how children are educated — and nearly everything in-between — our society has become obsessed with a seductive illusion: that greatness results from doggedly measuring improvement in the relentless pursuit of an ambitious goal. In Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned—The Myth of…
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