Stand in front of a mirror, stare at your own eyes for long enough, and your face may seem to warp, blur, or even become strangely unfamiliar. That eerie feeling is not a glitch in the glass; it is your brain quietly editing reality on the fly. From optical illusions that break the internet ...
Somewhere behind your eyes, something is having a first-person experience of the world, and we still don’t really know how. Neuroscientists can now watch brain cells fire in real time, map networks with staggering detail, and even nudge brain activity with magnetic pulses – yet the raw feeling of being you remains stubbornly mysterious. ...
Night after night, we do something so ordinary it borders on boring: we close our eyes, disconnect from the world, and surrender to sleep. Yet this seemingly passive state may be one of the most active and high-stakes operations our brains ever perform. When sleep falters, everything from memory to mood to immune defenses ...
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 ...
The human brain is only a fist-sized lump of tissue, yet it routinely produces experiences that people describe as sacred, supernatural, or downright impossible to put into words. For centuries, these states were claimed as proof of ghosts, gods, or other realms; now, high-resolution brain scans and finely tuned experiments are starting to map ...
The more neuroscientists learn about the human brain, the stranger it becomes. Powerful scanners can track blood flow in real time, algorithms can decode rough shapes from neural activity, and yet some of the most basic questions about how we think, feel, and decide remain stubbornly unanswered. The brain is less a clockwork machine ...
The human brain has a habit of behaving like a magician that refuses to reveal its tricks. Every so often, a case explodes into the medical literature that sounds less like neurology and more like a ghost story, forcing scientists to admit that our models of perception and selfhood are still painfully incomplete. From ...
Deep beneath your feet, far below the crust and the continents and the oceans, something may be quietly shaping the way you think. A new wave of research is exploring a wild idea: that Earth’s gravity and layered interior might not just support life, but help sculpt the very way brains evolve. Instead of ...
For decades, lucid dreaming sat on the edge of science like a ghost story people swore was real but couldn’t quite prove. You either had one of those startling dreams where you suddenly knew you were dreaming, or you rolled your eyes and filed it under internet folklore. Now, a growing body of research ...
Every night, as city lights glow and phone screens dim, a quiet experiment unfolds inside our skulls. We lie down, lose consciousness, and somehow wake up able to think clearly, remember yesterday, and face tomorrow. When sleep goes wrong, though, everything frays: moods sour, focus splinters, and even the body’s basic systems start to ...
