What does something have to have to give us pleasure? Kelly Sikkema / Unsplash We humans, like other cognitive systems, are sensitive to our environment. We use sensory information to guide our behaviour. To be in the world. We decide how to act based on the hedonic value we assign to objects, people, situations or events. We seek out and engage in behaviours that lead to positive or rewarding outcomes and avoid those that lead to negative or punitive consequences. We construct our knowledge of the world according to how much we like elements of the environment, and we do so by learning and ge ..read more

Shutterstock In the early 1990s, British neuroscientist Karl Friston was poring over brain scans. The scans produced terabytes of digital output, and Friston had to find new techniques to sort and classify the massive flows of data. Along the way he had a revelation. The techniques he was using might be similar to what the brain itself was doing when it processed visual data. Could it be he had stumbled upon a solution to a data engineering problem that nature had discovered long ago? Friston’s eureka moment led to a “theory of everything”, which claims to explain the behaviour of the brain ..read more

Good news for parents... PR Image Factory/Shutterstock Many parents feel guilty when their children play video games for hours on end. Some even worry it could make their children less clever. And, indeed, that’s a topic scientists have clashed over for years. In our new study, we investigated how video games affect the minds of children, interviewing and testing more than 5,000 children aged ten to 12. And the results, published in Scientific Reports, will be surprising to some. Children were asked how many hours a day they spent on social media, watching videos or TV, and playing video games ..read more

Reason is not the only factor that guides vaccine decisions. Understanding human decision-making is the first step in changing behaviour. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chad Hipolito When the Green Bay Packers lost a playoff game to the San Francisco 49ers on Jan. 22, Twitter users were quick to roast Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ anti-vaccination beliefs. Rodgers misled his teammates about his vaccination status before testing positive for COVID-19 last November, revealing he was unvaccinated and stating that he was a critical thinker who had done his own research. Responses to Rodgers’ admission i ..read more

You might just be getting better at the game you're practicing. Malcolm Lightbody/Unsplash, CC BY You’ve probably seen ads for apps promising to make you smarter in just a few minutes a day. Hundreds of so-called “brain training” programs can be purchased for download. These simple games are designed to challenge mental abilities, with the ultimate goal of improving the performance of important everyday tasks. But can just clicking away at animations of swimming fish or flashed streets signs on your phone really help you improve the way your brain functions? Two large groups of scientists and ..read more

If the goal is to communicate, why should the speaker bear all the burden? Mimi Thian/Unsplash, CC BY Conversation is at the heart of people’s lives. We use language to communicate our hopes and dreams to our closest friends, to ask for help from colleagues at work and to describe our ailments to medical professionals. Typically this process of communication goes fairly smoothly. But there are circumstances that can make communication even between two healthy adults more challenging – consider the native language background of the two participants. It’s commonly understood that non-native spee ..read more

Lia Koltyrina/Shutterstock As the very word used to describe it has been “worn smooth by a million tongues”, consciousness is a fertile topic for confusion. We all know what it is to be conscious. It is, basically, being aware of and responding to the world. Similarly, we all possess a common sense notion of how consciousness works. But common sense can be easily confused. Consider these questions for example: if you felt pain in an amputated leg, where is the pain? If you say it is in your head, would it be in your head if your leg had not been amputated? If you say yes, then what reason have ..read more

Research shows that people who have flow as a regular part of their lives are happier and less likely to focus on themselves. Yulkapopkova/E+ via Getty Images New years often come with new resolutions. Get back in shape. Read more. Make more time for friends and family. My list of resolutions might not look quite the same as yours, but each of our resolutions represents a plan for something new, or at least a little bit different. As you craft your 2022 resolutions, I hope that you will add one that is also on my list: feel more flow. Psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s research on flow sta ..read more

You don't really need to remember what you ordered at the bakery a couple weeks ago. andresr/E+ via Getty Images When asked the other day about a bakery near my home, I responded that I’d recently eaten its mouth-watering chocolate chip cookies. My wife corrected me, noting that the cookies I ate were actually oatmeal raisin. Why did I make this memory error? Is this an early sign of impending dementia? Should I call my doctor? Or is forgetting the details of a dessert a good thing, given that everyday life is filled with an enormous number of details, too many for a finite human brain to reme ..read more

The feeling that something is "on the tip of your tongue" but you can't quite remember it may be more indicative of a good memory than a bad one. (Shutterstock) What is the baby lion’s name in Disney’s The Lion King? If you feel sure that you know it, and it is on the verge of coming back to you but you can’t quite remember it right now, then you’re experiencing a tip-of-the-tongue feeling. Tip-of-the-tongue feelings can also occur when people try to remember things together. For instance, a group of friends may simultaneously have the name of a movie’s main actress on the tip of their tongues ..read more