Cognition

New experiments show that the brain distinguishes between perceived and imagined mental images by checking whether they cross a “reality threshold.”

Feelings of loneliness prompt changes in the brain that further isolate people from social contact.

Dreams are subjective, but there are ways to peer into the minds of people while they are dreaming. Steven Strogatz speaks with sleep researcher Antonio Zadra about how new experimental methods have changed our understanding of dreams.

Self-supervised learning allows a neural network to figure out for itself what matters. The process might be what makes our own brains so successful.

Christopher Kanan is building algorithms that can continuously learn over time — the way we do.

Intelligent beings learn by interacting with the world. Artificial intelligence researchers have adopted a similar strategy to teach their virtual agents new tricks.

The detailed understanding of brains and multicellular bodies reached new heights this year, while the genomes of the COVID-19 virus and various organisms yielded more surprises.

Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.

Scientists thought that the brain’s hearing centers might just process speech along with other sounds. But new work suggests that speech gets some special treatment very early on.