Earlier this year, my daughter moved into college for her first year of university. Amid the boxes lining the hallways, I noticed a bulletin board covered in photos of scrub-clad physicians and inspirational quotes. When I stopped to take a closer look, the mother of the student it belonged to came out to say hello.
“I told my daughter to put her vision board where she can see it every time she…
Neuroscience seems an unlikely place to find fundamental truths that could apply to everything in the universe. Brains are specific objects that do things that few, if any, other objects in the universe seem capable of. They perceive. They act. They read magazine articles. They are usually the exception, not the rule.
That is perhaps why the free-energy principle (FEP) has garnered so much attention. What began in the early 2000s as a tool to explain cognitive processes like perception and action began to be presented as a “unified brain theory”. Then the FEP outgrew the brain, being put forward as a definition of life and, inevitably, as the basis for a new kind of artificial intelligence that can reason. Today, some proponents argue that the FEP even encapsulates what it means for something in the universe to exist at all. “You can read the free-energy principle as a physics of self-organisation,” says its originator, Karl Friston at University College London. “It is a description of things that persist.”
Yet some researchers are sceptical that the FEP can live up to many of its loftiest promises, having grown frustrated with its shifting scope. “It has been a moving target,” says Matteo Colombo, philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tilburg University, the Netherlands.
All of which has made the FEP a source of both fascination and frustration. Its dizzying breadth is key to its enduring appeal, even while it remains famously difficult to get your head around. So, given the claims that it can be used to explain…
We have probably all heard someone say they are “a little bit OCD”, perhaps jokily or as a matter of pride, in reference to their meticulous rearrangement of their bookshelves or habit of spending rather too long cleaning their bathroom.
Most of us have a rough idea of what obsessive-compulsive disorder is, but it tends to be viewed as a behavioural quirk. In fact, this condition – characterised by intrusive thoughts and compulsive actions that you can’t stop – is debilitating for the 1 to 3 per cent of the global population it affects.
In this light, quips about being “a little bit OCD” risk trivialising a condition that can be every bit as serious as schizophrenia or depression. The misuse of the term might reflect our ignorance about OCD. But as we explore in “A fresh understanding of OCD is opening routes to new treatments“, we are now discovering more about how it manifests in the brain – with implications for how we think about the condition.
It is true that a degree of obsessiveness and compulsive behaviour is present in all of us. We go back to check that we locked the front door, and we can’t stop our mind wandering to a looming stressful event. In fact, many OCD symptoms seem to represent distortions of useful behaviours. But imagine if the intrusive thoughts and urges to take action didn’t stop? That is what characterises OCD.
We are learning that OCD is a complex condition, with the immune system playing a part
Thanks to decades of research into the underlying mechanisms behind the condition, we now know that entire brain networks are affected, with significant imbalances in the neurotransmitters that drive the transmission of signals around them. We are also learning that it is a more complex condition than we thought, with the immune system and perhaps even microbes in the gut playing a part.
These insights into the drivers of OCD in the body and brain are opening the way to new treatments, which are sorely needed for those who don’t respond to the current first-line therapies. What is abundantly clear, however, is that OCD is a profoundly distressing condition that we are just beginning to get to grips with. It is past time we stopped with the quips.
An anti-lockdown protest in Trafalgar Square, London, in August 2020
Richard Baker/Getty Images
Many people who respond to surveys saying that they believe in conspiracy theories probably don’t think they are actually true. This means that attempts to assess the prevalence of these beliefs could be skewed.
Such surveys are the main way of gauging the pervasiveness of conspiracy theories, but they rarely ask respondents if their answers are sincere. Now, Robert Ross at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his colleagues have surveyed 1044 adults from around the country, who they contacted via the market research company YouGov.…
I have a new book coming out in June, and New Scientist is to blame. Back in the summer of 2020, I wrote this column about a study led by computational social scientist Meysam Alizadeh, who worked to algorithmically predict waves of propaganda on Twitter and Reddit. Alizadeh said he and his colleagues wanted to create a “propaganda weather report” so that people on social media would be forewarned about incoming influence campaigns. It seemed like a great idea.
The question of consciousness is one of the biggest mysteries in science
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Two years after opening our bureau in New York, we are delighted to share that New Scientist is launching a new live event series in the US. This kicks off on 22 June in New York with a one-day masterclass on the science of the brain and human consciousness. To celebrate, we have unlocked access to five in-depth features exploring mysteries of the human mind.
There is perhaps no bigger puzzle of human experience than consciousness. In the simplest terms, it is awareness of our existence. It is our experience of ourselves and the world.
Less clear is how and why this happens – and whether other creatures, or indeed machines and forms of artificial intelligence, can also experience consciousness in the way that we do.
For much of human history, the notion that we could somehow explain or fully understand consciousness seemed fanciful, beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, even. But in recent decades, we have got ever closer to pinning down the physical structures, mechanisms and neural networks responsible.
As neuroscientist Christof Koch had to concede last year, we aren’t there yet though. “When you’re young you gotta believe that things are simple,” Koch said, acknowledging that he had lost a 25-year-old bet with philosopher David Chalmers that by 2023 we would have pinned down exactly which set of brain cells give rise to our conscious experience of the world.
Still, Koch needn’t take it too hard: we are inching closer all the time, teasing out fresh insights into everything from what happens in our brains when we sleep and dream to the way that increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence is challenging what it means to be conscious – and how we could even recognise this in machines were it to happen.
A one-day masterclass on consciousness
Join us in New York City on 22 June for an Instant Expert event on the latest science of consciousness and the human brain.
Picture someone with hypochondria. It may be a friend who keeps an inventory of symptoms and ailments, is never without a doctor’s appointment and turns up armed with the latest from Google. Some doctors label such people disparagingly as the “worried well”, those whose demand on medical services is seen to outweigh their need.
But a new book challenges that derogatory and outdated view of hypochondria – now more commonly known as health…
At university, I had two roommates with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a painful condition affecting the digestive system. Both also had anxiety. But there was a key difference between them that stuck with me. While one found IBS treatments attenuated her anxiety, the other found relief through the opposite approach: her stomach pain only eased after seeing a psychiatrist. It was an astonishing lesson for me in the complexity of the relationship…
In the middle of the last century, the psychologist Abraham Maslow set about investigating the foundations of happiness. Interviewing people about their lives, he was intrigued to find that many reported having experienced rare moments of epiphany, associated with “awe… rapture, ecstasy or bliss” in which “all separateness or distance from the world disappeared”.
Those feelings were often accompanied by a sense of great understanding, Maslow said – “the feeling that they had seen the ultimate truth, the essence of things”. He described these as “peak experiences”, and subsequent research confirms these moments can contribute to long-term well-being. Whether we…
AFTER our joyful revelling comes the inevitable season of good intentions. When we make our New Year’s resolutions, we often set ourselves ambitious goals – to run a half-marathon, learn a language or write a novel. One reason these resolutions often fail is that our focus is too wide – we think about the reward at the end of the journey, not considering the little steps that we need to take to get there. Then we end up feeling defeated and dejected as we fail to make the progress we want.
Perhaps we should all try to apply the Japanese concept of…
