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Cognitive Development
When people born blind gain sight, the hardest part isn’t opening their eyes — it’s teaching the brain how to see.
AI can now generate entire worlds from text prompts. What does this mean for how we think, create, and connect?
In this excerpt from "Playful," Cas Holman surveys the research that brought the neuroscience of play into the mainstream.
Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.
"Ultimately, the choice rests with each individual: whether to take the convenient route of allowing AI to handle our critical thinking, or to preserve this essential cognitive process for ourselves."
The Roman Empire at one point emitted roughly 3,600 tons of lead dust per year, causing “widespread cognitive decline.”
A crowdsourced "final exam" for AI promises to test LLMs like never before. Here's how the idea, and its implementation, dooms us to fail.
The controversial theory about magic mushrooms and human evolution gets a much-needed update.
"The Big Map of Who Lived When" plots the lifespans of historical figures — from Eminem all the way back to Genghis Khan.
For most of human history, babies probably picked up language by overhearing.
We may be on the brink of finally seeing human-level intelligence in an AI — thanks to robots.
College students once stood out from the pack on IQ tests. Today, they're about average.
From Hogwarts to hashtags, kids' reading habits have changed drastically in recent decades — but data suggests cause for hope.
They have held our fascination ever since we first identified their remains.
Is it better to be the oldest sibling, the youngest, or in the middle?
Even before birth, our brains are taking note of the languages we hear.
AIs can imitate but not innovate — for now, at least.
While executive function matures between 18 and 20 years of age, the brain keeps changing long afterward.
If you want to achieve new goals, harness your brain's ability to change chemically, structurally, and functionally.
Philosophy is often seen as little more than armchair speculation. This is a shame, as philosophy often has helped science reach new heights.
New research shows that the transition from general to specific memories involves the maturation of inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus.
The replication crisis has debunked many of psychology’s fair-haired hypotheses, but for the marshmallow test, things have only become more interesting.
Neuroscience is beginning to provide clues about the emergence of human consciousness.
John Templeton Foundation
Adolescents’ brains are highly capable, if inconsistent, during this critical age of exploration and development. They are also acutely tuned into rewards.
Chess could perhaps be the ultimate window through which we might see how our mental powers shift during our lives.
The puzzle of play
The purpose of play — for children, monkeys, rats or meerkats — has proved surprisingly hard to pin down. Scientists continue to toss around ideas.
This is the latest study to confirm that the brain does not fully mature until at least the third decade of life.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
Your five-year-old can probably spot a cop-out.