July 23, 2025
(Wired) – Summer. For teens not at work, it’s hot, it’s boring, and it’s an ideal time to close the door and spend about every waking moment watching, playing, texting, streaming—anything but talking—on the phone. With almost half of teenagers … Read More
July 22, 2025
(NBC News) – The stress of lockdowns, fear and social isolation appear to have left a mark on our brains. Experts say it may be possible to counteract the changes. Brain aging may have sped up during the pandemic, even … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Wired) – Millions of people suffer debilitating reactions in the presence of certain scents and chemicals. One scientist has been struggling for decades to understand why—as she battles the condition herself. In 1997, Miller proposed a career-defining theory of how … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Wired) – Unlike Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface, Synchron’s doesn’t require open-skull surgery, and it has an OpenAI chatbot baked in. While Musk envisions a transhumanist fusion of mind and machine, Synchron is focused on meeting the immediate needs of people … Read More
July 21, 2025
(Comment) – But what if the creation of language and its communication are fundamentally different from what LLMs are doing? What if language use is not just one more skill among many? What if LLMs are subtly altering how we … Read More
July 16, 2025
(New York Times) – When it comes to mental health, most treatments for conditions like depression or anxiety come with caveats. Medications work for some symptoms, but can exacerbate others. Cognitive behavioral therapy is effective for many patients, but not … Read More
July 16, 2025
(Forbes) – Some professionals have warned against the excessive use of YouTube Shorts. For example, ChoosingTherapy.com, an outline site for mental health articles, released a report in 2023 describing how the compulsive urge to watch videos on YouTube can lead … Read More
July 16, 2025
(The Guardian) – Do you scream when you stub your toe? Could you play a grand final with a shattered jaw, or work all day as your belly fills with blood? When it comes to suffering, perspective is everything Each … Read More
July 15, 2025
(The Guardian) – Polyamorous but married to a monogamous wife, Travis soon found himself falling in love. Before long, with the approval of his human wife, he married Lily Rose in a digital ceremony. This unlikely relationship forms the basis … Read More
July 11, 2025
(New York Times) – A man’s death after using “Flow” in a small Vermont city exposed a drug operation that spanned continents and sent a New York prosecutor on a heartbreaking journey. The Flow case encompassed scores of investigators, prosecutors … Read More
July 8, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – It’s a common view among neuroscientists that building brainlike neural networks is one of the most promising paths for the field, and that attitude has started to spread to psychology. Last week, the prestigious journal Nature … Read More
July 7, 2025
(Axios) – It’s not food, it’s not chewing tobacco and it’s not gum — though it might look like it when you see it — but it is becoming America’s new addictive obsession. Why it matters: Sales of Zyn nicotine … Read More
July 7, 2025
(Wired) – As psychedelic companies and therapy apps experiment with AI, people are already taking huge doses of drugs and using chatbots to process their trips. He recently asked the app’s “chat with your mind” function how he had become … Read More
July 4, 2025
(Nature) – Brain–computer interfaces being trialled in China offer some advantages over Neuralink and other leading US devices. A deep brain device that allowed a man with no limbs to play computer games is one of an increasing number of … Read More
July 3, 2025
(Undark) – Although the evidence is limited, some psychiatrists are using ketogenic diets to treat psychiatric disorders. In fact, ketogenic diets have long been used in conventional medicine to treat severe or intractable epilepsy. Several studies published in the past … Read More
July 3, 2025
(Front Porch Republic) – One does not need too much imagination to understand how Leopold’s critique of over-mechanized hunting is generalizable to the relationship between technology and all facets of life. In the case of large language models and their … Read More
July 2, 2025
(MIT Technology Review) – Peter—who asked to have his last name omitted from this story for privacy reasons—is far from alone. A growing number of people are using AI chatbots as “trip sitters”—a phrase that traditionally refers to a sober … Read More
July 1, 2025
(Aeon) – Emerging research from the past few years has revealed that, within an individual, ADHD can be highly unstable across the lifespan. Many, if not most, individuals with ADHD, will meet formal diagnostic criteria for the disorder during some … Read More
July 1, 2025
(Harper’s Magazine) – What were we if not obsessive-compulsive, we who so often traced our origins to a people whose very name, the Puritans, epitomized the perfectionistic delusion underlying this illness? A people so committed to virtue that they’d risked … Read More
June 30, 2025
(Wall Street Journal) – Among members of the Richardson family who carry a mutation in the PSEN1 gene, the average age when symptoms start is 39 Hannah’s family has a history of a rare genetic mutation that, when inherited, virtually … Read More
June 30, 2025
(The New Yorker) – Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, and many other notorious figures lived in and around Tacoma in the sixties. A new book argues that there was something in the water. During the “golden age” of serial killing, between … Read More
June 24, 2025
(New York Times) – Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, is correct that reported autism rates have exploded in the last 30 years — they’ve increased roughly 60-fold — but he is dead wrong about the … Read More
June 24, 2025
(Aeon) – The misunderstood story of Phineas Gage shows that we need a new way of understanding the experiences of brain injury survivors We mostly used the term ‘disinhibition’ as a mitigation: an invitation to think creatively about how to … Read More
June 24, 2025
(Nature) – Liraglutide, a member of the family of blockbuster weight-loss drugs, reduces headaches by half in a small study. Head-splitting migraines could be the next ailment in a seemingly endless list that a class of blockbuster weight-loss drugs might … Read More
June 20, 2025
(TIME) – Does ChatGPT harm critical thinking abilities? A new study from researchers at MIT’s Media Lab has returned some concerning results. The study divided 54 subjects—18 to 39 year-olds from the Boston area—into three groups, and asked them to … Read More
