Some people wake up and can tell you exactly what they ate, watched, and worried about on a random Tuesday fifteen years ago. For researchers, this rare ability – often called highly superior autobiographical memory – poses a riveting puzzle: how can recall be so rich for personal days yet mostly ordinary for everything else? ...
You probably trust your memories more than you trust most people, yet neuroscience has spent the past few decades quietly showing how slippery they really are. In labs and hospital wards, researchers have watched people lose decades of their past in seconds, only to discover that much of what makes them “them” stubbornly remains. ...
Every night, our brains spin private movies from scraps of memory, fear, and desire, and then erase most of the footage before morning. We wake up shaken by a nightmare, warmed by a tender reunion, or baffled by a scene that makes absolutely no sense – and yet feels oddly important. For centuries, dreams ...
For something we live inside every waking moment, consciousness is still one of science’s strangest mysteries. For more than a century, researchers have poked the brain, mapped it, scanned it, and simulated it, and yet the basic question has lingered: how does the buzzing activity of neurons become the feeling of being you? In ...
