It’s a harrowing tale of deadly winters in Berlin captivity
The post What Became of the Chimps Who Revolutionized Our Understanding of Animal Behavior? appeared first on Nautilus.
A dog’s nose is a gateway to a richer world, and scent-filled walks, games, and food hunts can transform boredom and stress into excitement, focus, and discovery. While we are captivated by a vivid sunset and breathtaking views, dogs have their noses to the ground, reading the odor stories left behind by other dogs and [...]
We are writers and editors reading the research, not clinicians, paediatricians, or child psychologists. What follows is reflection on published studies, not guidance for any individual family. The findings here are drawn from controlled research; population-level patterns are not prescriptions for your own child.
Feed some children sugar and others a sugar-free sweetener, and make sure nobody knows who got which. When you do that, the sugar does nothing measurable to how the children behave. That is the result pooled across roughly two dozen experiments in a 1995 review, and it has held up for three decades.
The children on sugar do not get more wound up. What changes, in a separate line of research, is the adult watching them.
The anchor is a review published in JAMA in 1995 by Mark Wolraich, David Wilson and J. Wade White, then in the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University. Pulling together the controlled trials available at the time, they concluded that “sugar (mainly sucrose) does not affect the behavior or cognitive performance of children”. Reviewers note the analysis covered 23 experiments across 16 scientific papers, which is where the “two dozen” figure comes from.
This does not prove sugar can never matter. A small effect, or an effect in some particular group of children, could not be ruled out. What the pooled trials showed was no demonstrable change in behaviour, not certainty that sugar is harmless for everyone. The popular version tends to flatten into “sugar has no effect, full stop,” which the data does not quite support.
The strength of the finding comes from how strict the rules were. To count, a study had to feed children a set amount of sugar, compare it against a look-alike sweetener, and keep everyone in the dark about which was which: the children, the parents, and the research staff all had to be kept from knowing.
That last part shapes everything. If a parent does not know sugar was served, they cannot pin behaviour on it. Picture a parent watching a child eat cake at a party and then act up: the parent has already decided what caused it. Take away that knowledge, and the effect disappears. Which raises the obvious question of where the effect was coming from in the first place.
A study published a year earlier, in 1994, answered it about as directly as an experiment can. Daniel Hoover and Richard Milich, at the University of Kentucky, tested thirty-five boys, aged five to seven, whose mothers described them as sensitive to sugar.
The trick was in what the mothers were told. As the authors put it: “In the experimental group, mothers were told their children had received a large dose of sugar, whereas in the control condition mothers were told their sons received a placebo; all children actually received the placebo (aspartame).” Every boy got the sugar-free sweetener, but half the mothers were told their sons had been loaded with sugar.
The only thing that varied was the belief planted in the mother. And that belief moved the ratings. The authors report: “Mothers in the sugar expectancy condition rated their children as significantly more hyperactive.” How much trouble they saw tracked the story they had been given, not anything the child had eaten.
The behaviour that actually shifted was the mother’s own. The authors note that these mothers “exercised more control by maintaining physical closeness, as well as showing trends to criticize, look at, and talk to their sons more than did control mothers.”
This is one small study of thirty-five boys, so read it as a vivid demonstration of how the effect works, not a universal law about all parents. The direction, though, is hard to miss. Told a child had been given sugar, a mother hovered closer, watched harder, and found more to correct.
The 1995 authors had a plain explanation for why the belief persists despite the trials: expectation and simple association.
Sugar tends to turn up alongside the things that wind children up. Birthday parties, holidays, late nights, crowds of other children, a break from routine. The cake is present at the chaos, so the cake gets the blame.
An expectation, once held, tends to confirm itself in ways that are hard to spot from the inside. A parent who believes sugar causes trouble watches the child more closely after sugar, and closer watching finds more to flag. The child does not have to change for the report to change. Anyone who has scrutinised someone more carefully because they were warned to expect a problem has run a small version of this experiment without meaning to.
None of this means sugar is good for children. This is not an argument about diet or dental health, which are separate questions with their own evidence. The narrow claim is only this: under blinded conditions, the behaviour change so many adults are sure they have seen does not seem to show up.
The sugar-and-hyperactivity story may end up being less about children than about how confidently an adult can misread a moment once they already know what the answer is supposed to be.
If you are worried about a child’s attention or activity levels, we recommend you consult a paediatrician or child psychologist rather than making any decisions on articles such as this.
The post Sugar may not make children hyperactive: across two dozen controlled trials the sugar did nothing measurable. In one small experiment, what changed was the parent — mothers who thought their sons had been given sugar rated them as more hyperactive and hovered closer. appeared first on Space Daily.
Psychologist Candice Odgers has studied adolescent mental health for 25 years. She fears the current debate around smartphones obscures some of the biggest issues facing teenagers – from the impact of Covid to the health of their adult caregivers
The quickest way to make being online safer for children and teens would be to kick all adult men off the internet, the Canadian psychologist Candice Odgers believes. Men are the biggest perpetrators of sextortion and most likely to spread misinformation, she says.
Odgers is not recommending this as a policy for governments to adopt: “That would be crazy, right? It would be unfair.” But she is on a drive to puncture the prevailing narrative that the best way to address online harms is a social media ban for teenagers.
Continue reading...
© Photograph: Jessica Pons/The Guardian
© Photograph: Jessica Pons/The Guardian
© Photograph: Jessica Pons/The Guardian
Men and women performed similarly on most multitasking measures, but a difference in conversational engagement may shape how their overall ability is perceived. A person can keep cooking, search for information, and track a visual task without appearing overwhelmed. But if they stop responding during a conversation, others may quickly assume they are losing control. [...]
A large longitudinal study examined whether hormone exposure from combined oral contraceptives is associated with changes in emotional eating. Hormonal birth control is widely used, but its effects can extend beyond pregnancy prevention. New research suggests that, for some women, the active hormone pills in combined oral contraceptives may also influence eating behavior. In a [...]
For thousands of years, humans have deliberately manipulated their breathing in search of something outside the ordinary waking mind. Now, scientists are finding measurable evidence that the right pattern of breathing may push consciousness into territory normally associated with psychedelic drugs.
In the first randomized controlled study to directly examine breathwork-induced altered states of consciousness, researchers found that a single 90-minute session of intense, continuous breathing produced significantly stronger psychedelic-like effects than meditation, including mystical experiences, feelings of oneness, visual changes, and powerful emotional breakthroughs.
Even more intriguingly, participants reported greater psychological understanding and behavioral changes a week later.
Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the findings add to a growing body of research investigating whether deliberately altering respiration can provide a drug-free pathway into altered states of consciousness, possibly reproducing some of the psychological effects increasingly associated with psychedelic therapy.
The study focused on conscious connected breathing, or CCB, a form of high-ventilation breathwork involving continuous breathing without pauses between inhalation and exhalation.
Unlike the slow, deliberate breathing commonly associated with relaxation, high-ventilation breathwork intentionally increases the rate or depth of respiration.
During trials, participants continuously breathed through their mouths, actively inhaling and passively exhaling while listening to music that progressed from loud and fast-paced to progressively slower and softer over 90 minutes.
“Results from this preliminary experimental study indicate that breathwork is associated with larger acute psychedelic-like effects than meditation,” researchers write. “These exploratory relationships and preliminary observations provide greater context around breathwork-induced ASCs and support the feasibility of ASC-focused breathwork research for future confirmatory trials.”
Breathing techniques have played a role in spiritual and contemplative practices for millennia. Yogic traditions include both slow and rapid breathing methods, while intentional respiration also appears in Qigong, Sufi dhikr, and shamanic practices.
Researchers say the scientific study of high-ventilation breathwork remains in its “embryonic” stage. However, that is slowly beginning to change.
As The Debrief previously reported, researchers using MRI and physiological measurements found that intense circular breathwork could produce altered states resembling those associated with psychedelics. The intensity of participants’ subjective experiences was tracked with changes in cerebral blood flow and autonomic nervous system activity.
However, those earlier investigations lacked a control group.
The new research, called the Airways to Alteration, or A2A, trial, attempted to address that limitation by directly comparing high-ventilation breathwork with an established contemplative practice: body scan meditation.
Researchers recruited 24 relatively healthy adults between 18 and 65. All had previously practiced conscious connected breathing without experiencing an adverse event.
Twelve participants were randomly assigned to the breathwork group. The remaining 12 underwent a 40-minute guided body scan meditation.
The researchers deliberately chose meditation as an active comparison rather than simply asking a control group to do nothing. Both groups lay on mats, used eye masks, listened to music, and participated in similar orientation and grounding procedures.
Meditation itself has also been associated with altered states and mystical experiences. In effect, the researchers were comparing two practices capable of shifting subjective awareness.
What happened next, however, was markedly different.
Immediately after the sessions, participants completed several standardized psychological questionnaires commonly used in psychedelic research.
The breathwork group scored significantly higher in overall mystical experience, oneness, positive mood, and “ineffability”—the feeling that an experience is difficult or impossible to adequately describe in words.
On the study’s measure of total mystical experience, the median score for breathwork participants was 14. The meditation group scored 8.5.
The difference in emotional breakthrough was even more striking.
Participants who completed breathwork had a median Emotional Breakthrough Inventory score of 336. Those who meditated had a median score of 57.5.
Researchers also examined five dimensions commonly associated with altered states of consciousness. Breathwork participants reported significantly higher levels of “oceanic boundlessness” and “visionary restructuralisation.”
Oceanic boundlessness encompasses experiences including feelings of oneness, spiritual insight, bliss, and a loosening of the ordinary sense of self. Visionary restructuring includes changes in visual perception and imagery.
One participant described experiencing “very interesting visual hallucinations” alongside a “very cathartic emotional release.”
Another said the session produced stronger psychedelic qualities than they had experienced during previous breathwork sessions.
“The experience was emotional and cathartic,” the participant reported, noting that “at one time, I cried but not with sadness, more with a strong feeling of what life is all about and how incredible it is and how lucky we are.”
Not everyone described the experience as psychedelic. One participant said they remained fully present throughout the session and primarily experienced a physical and psychological release.
Still, the overall pattern revealed that compared with meditation, intense breathwork was associated with substantially stronger acute alterations in consciousness.
What may be the study’s most consequential finding emerged a week later. Researchers asked participants to complete a Psychological Insight Scale designed to assess meaningful personal realizations following psychedelic experiences.
The breathwork group reported a median psychological insight score of 33.67. The meditation group scored 5.83. Self-reported behavioral change followed a similar pattern. Breathwork participants had a median score of 50, compared with 5.5 among those who meditated.
Both differences represented large effect sizes.
The results suggest that the altered state produced during breathwork may be associated with psychological changes that go beyond the acute experience.
“Amongst the secondary outcomes, the breathwork group self-reported substantially greater psychological insight and accompanied behavioral change compared to the meditation group, with large effect sizes observed for both measures,” the researchers explain. “This finding suggests that breathwork could be connected to meaningful psychological breakthroughs, accompanied by translation of these insights into tangible behavioral modifications.”
The researchers caution that these personal accounts are anecdotal and that the qualitative portion of the study was limited. Still, the reports appeared broadly consistent with the measurable differences in mental insight and self-reported behavioral change.
The study also uncovered an unexpected difference involving sleep. Both groups showed improvements in stress, anxiety, depression, and overall mental well-being. However, researchers found a considerable difference between the two groups: breathwork produced significantly greater improvements in sleep-related impairment.
Median sleep impairment scores in the breathwork group dropped from 54.8 before the intervention to 39.2 afterward. Scores among meditation participants remained comparatively stable.
More intriguingly, improvements in sleep were correlated with the intensity of participants’ mystical experiences, feelings of oneness, and oceanic boundlessness.
In other words, participants who reported deeper altered states also tended to report greater improvements in sleep.
Exactly how the two may be connected remains unclear. The researchers note that sleep is itself an altered state of consciousness and plays an essential function in memory consolidation and insight, including the mental reorganization that can lead to new understanding. Still, the apparent link between deeper breathwork-induced altered states and improved sleep remains preliminary.
Despite the comparisons, researchers caution against treating every altered state of consciousness as the same phenomenon.
A psychedelic state induced by psilocybin, a hyperventilation-driven state produced through breathwork, and deep meditative absorption may overlap on psychological questionnaires. That does not mean the brain achieves those states through identical mechanisms.
Nevertheless, the similarities are difficult to ignore.
Previous research has found that high-ventilation breathwork can produce effects on standardized altered-consciousness measurements within the range observed after moderate-to-high doses of psilocybin.
The earlier neuroimaging research covered by The Debrief also found that the depth of breathwork-induced altered states tracked with changes in cerebral blood flow and autonomic nervous system activity.
This latest study takes that research one step further. Rather than simply demonstrating that breathwork can produce psychedelic-like experiences, the controlled comparison suggests those experiences are substantially more intense than the effects produced by body scan meditation under broadly similar environmental conditions.
Researchers repeatedly emphasize that the A2A trial was a small, exploratory study and does not yet provide evidence that breathwork is a proven replacement for psychedelic-assisted therapy.
All participants had prior breathwork experience, which may have led them to enter the experiment with expectations about what would happen. The study was also open-label, and participants knew whether they were breathing intensely or meditating.
Additionally, the breathwork session lasted 90 minutes compared with 40 minutes for meditation. Breathwork participants also listened to more intense music and were explicitly told about the possibility of expanded states of consciousness, emotional expression, and unusual physical sensations.
Those differences could have influenced the results.
The study also excluded people with a range of cardiovascular, respiratory, neurological, and psychological conditions. No adverse events were reported, but researchers acknowledge this was unsurprising, as participants had already practiced the technique without prior adverse reactions.
For that reason, the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that intense breathwork is safe or appropriate for everyone.
Future experiments will need to recruit people who have never practiced breathwork and tease apart the different ingredients involved.
The findings also leave several important questions unanswered. How much of the altered state is driven by rapid breathing itself, and how much comes from the music or group setting? Perhaps most importantly, researchers still need to determine how strongly the expectation of a profound experience shapes what a person ultimately experiences.
Yet, for a field increasingly interested in whether altered states can be harnessed for therapeutic purposes, the outcomes yield an interesting possibility.
Under carefully controlled conditions, consciously manipulating something as fundamental as breathing appears capable of profoundly changing how people experience themselves and the world around them.
“A logical next step would be replicating our study in breathwork-naïve participants to help mitigate expectancy effects and determine whether such ASCs emerge as profoundly as in experienced practitioners,” researchers write. “Future research contrasting HVB effects across participants with varying experience levels and in different environments is essential for informing the public about safe breathwork engagement.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
More than a century after Sigmund Freud developed some of his most influential—and controversial—ideas about the human mind, a new study indicates that modern neuroscience may be arriving at a surprisingly familiar destination.
Researchers at the University of Oslo argue that Freud’s concepts of projection, wish fulfillment, transference, and the unconscious may share a fundamental architecture with one of the most influential emerging theories in cognitive neuroscience: the idea that the brain is essentially a prediction machine.
Rather than passively receiving information from the world, the brain may continuously anticipate what will happen next, compare those expectations with incoming sensory information, and either revise its internal model or act to make reality conform more closely to its expectations.
In a paper published in the journal Entropy, researchers propose that this modern “predictive processing” framework may provide a neuroscientific explanation for mental processes that psychoanalysts have described from the perspective of subjective human experience for more than a century.
The researchers do not claim that neuroscience has proved Freud right. Instead, they argue that psychoanalysis and predictive processing may describe some of the same fundamental operations of the mind at two very different levels of analysis.
“The predictive processing model is a paradigm of the mind where the brain’s main task is to construct and interact with the world through predictions,” researchers write. “The world we perceive and interact with is a world that we create from our past, from expectancies and actions.”
The basic idea behind predictive processing represents a significant departure from older models of perception. Traditionally, the brain was often described as something like an information-processing machine: a stimulus arrives from the outside world, the brain processes it, and a response follows.
Predictive processing effectively turns much of that sequence around.
Under this system, the brain is constantly generating models of what it expects to encounter. Those predictions are formed by previous experiences, biological needs, and learned expectations. Incoming sensory information is then compared against the brain’s predictions.
When the two match, all is relatively well. When they do not, the discrepancy creates what neuroscientists call a prediction error.
The brain can respond in at least two broad ways. It can update its internal model to better reflect reality, a process known as perceptual inference. Or it can act on the world in ways that make reality more closely correspond to its prior prediction, a process known as active inference.
Researchers point to a familiar example: the fear of snakes. Someone who assumes snakes are dangerous may gradually revise that expectation after repeated encounters with harmless ones, eventually becoming less afraid. But if the fear is strong enough, the person may avoid snakes entirely. By never getting close enough to discover that some pose no threat, their behavior prevents the prediction from being challenged—and, in effect, helps keep the fear alive.
“To perceive is to predict, to act is to act out the prediction,” researchers explain.
According to the researchers, this framework itself bears a striking resemblance to concepts developed by Freud and later psychoanalysts.
Freud proposed that people do not experience the world as completely neutral observers. Past experiences, desires, fears, and unconscious expectations can shape how they perceive other people and events. In psychoanalytic theory, “projection” can occur when a person attributes internal feelings or expectations to someone else.
A person who feels hostility, for example, may perceive others as hostile. Someone who expects criticism because of earlier relationships may interpret ambiguous behavior as rejection. In more complex cases, people may even behave in ways that encourage others to respond as expected.
The researchers argue that this resembles a form of prediction.
In both models, past experience creates a template to understand the present. The brain—or, in psychoanalytic terminology, the mind—attempts to reduce uncertainty by making the world familiar and predictable.
That does not necessarily mean making the world pleasant.
One of the more consequential implications of the proposed connection is that people may sometimes preserve painful or destructive patterns precisely because those patterns are familiar. A predictable threat can, in some circumstances, create less uncertainty than an unfamiliar form of safety.
The researchers use the example of a woman who was frequently criticized by her mother when she was a child. As an adult, she continues to carry an internal critical voice that tells her she is not good enough. Even when praised, she may dismiss the compliment as undeserved.
From a psychoanalytic perspective, she has internalized—or “introjected”—the critical relationship. From a predictive-processing perspective, positive feedback conflicts with a deeply accepted model of what she expects from herself and others.
The result is a provocative possibility. People sometimes reject evidence that their circumstances have changed because accepting it would require the brain to rebuild its model of the world.
“The one with paranoia and the one with a self-critical inner voice minimize surprise at the cost of reality testing and psychological flexibility,” the researchers write.
The proposed connection also reaches into the “free energy principle,” a conceptual framework associated with neuroscientist Dr. Karl Friston. In simple terms, the framework describes biological systems as continually working to limit uncertainty and maintain themselves within viable states.
For the brain, unexpected information produces what researchers describe as “surprisal.” The mismatch between anticipation and reality can force the brain to do additional work, either changing its model or changing its behavior.
This may help explain why surprise can be uncomfortable and why the familiar can feel safe even when it is objectively harmful.
Freud approached a similar problem via the concept of homeostasis, although he developed his ideas before the term became widely established. The researchers argue that Freud’s concept of “perceptual identity”—the predisposition to seek or recreate perceptions associated with previously satisfying experiences—may be particularly compatible with modern predictive processing.
If researchers are correct, it could have consequences for understanding psychotherapy.
In psychoanalysis, patients may repeatedly bring expectations formed in earlier relationships into their relationship with a therapist, a phenomenon termed transference. Someone accustomed to abandonment, hostility, or criticism may expect the therapist to behave in the same way.
A therapeutic relationship that repeatedly violates those expectations would create precisely the type of prediction error that forces an internal model to change.
In this view, cognitive awareness is not simply an intellectual realization. It may involve confronting the fact that a deeply embedded prediction about the world has failed.
That failure produces surprise. And surprise, the researchers suggest, may be one of the mechanisms that makes psychological change possible.
A patient who expects rejection yet repeatedly encounters a safe, reliable relationship faces a mismatch between prediction and reality. The person can attempt to preserve the old model, perhaps through interpreting benign behavior as threatening, or gradually update the model to accommodate a different possibility.
This is where researchers believe psychoanalysis may offer something that computational neuroscience alone cannot easily provide.
Predictive processing attempts to explain the mechanisms by which brains generate, test, and update predictions. In contrast, psychoanalysis has spent more than a century attempting to describe what those processes feel like from inside the person experiencing them.
The researchers are careful to acknowledge significant differences between the fields. Predictive processing is primarily a descriptive scientific framework intended to explain how minds and brains function. Psychoanalysis is a clinical practice concerned with psychological suffering and how it might be treated.
There is also a difference in emphasis. Neuroscience often studies ordinary predictions involved in perception and behavior, while psychoanalytic concepts such as projection have frequently been developed through observations of psychological distress and mental illness.
Most importantly, the paper does not present new experimental evidence demonstrating that Freud’s concepts relate to specific neural mechanisms. It is a theoretical synthesis proposing that two intellectual traditions, one built largely on clinical observation and subjective experience, the other on computational and neuroscientific models, may describe overlapping features of the mind.
Nevertheless, the proposed convergence is notable.
Freud originally hoped that psychological theories might eventually be connected to the brain’s biological workings, but the neuroscience of his era was nowhere near capable of doing so. For much of the 20th century, psychoanalysis and experimental neuroscience grew increasingly distant.
Predictive processing may offer an unexpected point of reconnection.
If the brain constantly uses the past to predict the present, then projection, transference, and even the tendency to repeat destructive patterns may be viewed not simply as abstract psychoanalytic concepts but as subjective manifestations of a more fundamental biological imperative: reducing uncertainty and maintaining a workable model of the world.
That position could ultimately change how researchers think about the relationship between the brain’s computational machinery and the intensely personal experience of being human. Rather than treating subjective experience and neuroscience as incompatible domains, the researchers suggest that each may illuminate what the other cannot see.
“Psychoanalysis consists of a vast resource of theories about the subjective mind, projection being central among these, and neuro-psychoanalysis adds an external view of the mind while studying the biological and neurological substrate of psychology,” researchers write.
“Relational encounters in a safe environment, as in psychoanalysis, can produce surprise,” the authors add, “which again permits new ways of predicting and being in the world.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
A recent study documented a participant using an AI model to simulate a conversation with her late grandmother. According to her report, the experience offered a sense of closure that she had not experienced before.
This interaction was one of sixteen documented in a study published in the Proceedings of the 2026 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. The research provides some of the first empirical data on how individuals respond to the opportunity to communicate with AI representations of deceased loved ones.
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder call these AI agents ‘generative ghosts.’ These systems use data such as writing, voice recordings, or photographs from the deceased to create simulated conversations. Some platforms, such as Project December and Séance AI, generate text-based versions of journal entries and messages. Others, such as HereAfterAI, include voice and images. A few companies have also developed virtual reality experiences that let users interact with holographic representations of loved ones.
Jack Manning, the PhD candidate in Information Science who led the study, expected the sessions to feel unsettling. “We originally thought it might feel very Black Mirror creepy to people and make them uncomfortable,” he said. “I ended up being completely wrong. People thought it was amazing.”
The study included 16 participants, aged 22 to 50, each of whom joined a Zoom interview about a deceased relative or friend. During the session, a facilitator led the conversation while another researcher entered details into a large language model, generating an AI representation of the deceased in real time.
Each participant interacted with two versions of the AI model for about twenty minutes each. One version spoke as the deceased, using the first person, while the other described the person in the third person. A facilitator stayed present to offer support if the conversation became emotionally difficult.
The results indicated a clear preference for the version that spoke as the deceased individual, rather than about them. Researchers described this as a preference for ‘reincarnation’ over ‘representation.’
Participants tended to overlook factual mistakes or made-up details from the AI. What mattered more was whether the AI captured the right tone and language. If the model used words or phrases that felt out of character, people were more likely to disconnect from the experience. The study found that getting the voice and manner right was more important than perfect factual accuracy.
How the AI communicated also shaped the experience. Participants preferred short, to-the-point sentences and even the use of emojis, rather than the longer, more formal responses that AI models often produce. This suggests that future versions of these systems should pay close attention to conversational style.
All sixteen participants indicated that they would be willing to use the technology again. However, most also expressed concerns about the potential risks of individuals in grief accessing these AI systems without supervision.
Lead researcher Jack Manning said his own experiences with loss have shaped his view of the risks and benefits of AI grief tools. He acknowledged that negative outcomes are possible but also noted that the technology could help some users find a sense of closure and peace.
Jed Brubaker, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of Information Science, said the lab took on the work precisely because the field had outpaced the research. “To our knowledge, we are conducting the first user experience studies of simulated AI ghosts,” he said.
The research team intends to involve mental health professionals in future studies. The next phase will evaluate the psychological risks and benefits of prolonged use of AI grief tools to ensure that empirical research guides product development.
Generative ghost technology is already available through commercial platforms, and people are actively using these systems. The study highlights that voice, tone, and pacing are often more important to users than factual accuracy. As the technology develops, researchers are working to address the challenges of providing appropriate safeguards and responsible design.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
TikTok's For You Page (FYP) is the default home screen for users of the video-sharing platform. It's a personalized, algorithmically driven content feed, but the approach differs from other social media in that TikTok's algorithm relies heavily on implicit signals—such as how long users watch particular videos—as well as explicit signals such as likes or follows. And generally, that algorithm does remarkably well at predicting which videos will interest particular users.
But some users have voiced concerns that TikTok's almighty algorithm doesn't seem to incorporate negative feedback very well. Even when they don't watch a suggested video or click the "not interested" feature, they keep seeing those videos on their FYP. Northeastern University computer scientists put those suspicions to the test. According to their recent paper, the engagement signals do have an effect, but only temporarily. Then the algorithm gradually relapses unless a user consistently gives the same feedback over and over again.
The research group specializes in "algorithm audits," co-author Piotr Sapiezynski told Ars, to better understand online platforms: "how they work, how they fail, when they fail, how they harm individuals and societies." In this case, he and his co-authors wanted to take a closer look at user agency after hearing multiple anecdotal reports from TikTok users that their negative feedback—responding to prompts by indicating they aren't interested or want to see less of a certain kind of video—doesn't seem to remove those posts from their FYP. "On the other hand, it's unclear why the platforms would offer it, if it doesn't work," said Sapiezynski.
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
TikTok's For You Page (FYP) is the default home screen for users of the video-sharing platform. It's a personalized, algorithmically driven content feed, but the approach differs from other social media in that TikTok's algorithm relies heavily on implicit signals—such as how long users watch particular videos—as well as explicit signals such as likes or follows. And generally, that algorithm does remarkably well at predicting which videos will interest particular users.
But some users have voiced concerns that TikTok's almighty algorithm doesn't seem to incorporate negative feedback very well. Even when they don't watch a suggested video or click the "not interested" feature, they keep seeing those videos on their FYP. Northeastern University computer scientists put those suspicions to the test. According to their recent paper, the engagement signals do have an effect, but only temporarily. Then the algorithm gradually relapses unless a user consistently gives the same feedback over and over again.
The research group specializes in "algorithm audits," co-author Piotr Sapiezynski told Ars, to better understand online platforms: "how they work, how they fail, when they fail, how they harm individuals and societies." In this case, he and his co-authors wanted to take a closer look at user agency after hearing multiple anecdotal reports from TikTok users that their negative feedback—responding to prompts by indicating they aren't interested or want to see less of a certain kind of video—doesn't seem to remove those posts from their FYP. "On the other hand, it's unclear why the platforms would offer it, if it doesn't work," said Sapiezynski.
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
Creatine may be beneficial as more than just a muscle-building supplement, as new research is investigating whether the popular compound could hold promise as a treatment for depression.
The University of Ottawa’s Bassam Jeryous Fares led the new studies, described in a recent paper in Brain Research, examining how creatine affects brain chemistry, particularly involving depression.
As one of the most popular workout supplements today, creatine has been well studied for its effects on muscle growth. However, the new findings suggest that its cognitive impact may have remained underappreciated.
For their research, the University of Ottawa team did not conduct new clinical trials. Instead, they reexamined existing data from a new perspective. The researchers identified five randomized controlled studies, published across six papers, in which neither participants nor physicians knew who received creatine or a placebo.
Together, the studies enrolled nearly 240 participants, evenly divided between the placebo and creatine groups. While most participants were women, the studies included individuals from South Korea, the United States, Brazil, India, and Israel.
The studies were focused on the mental impacts of creatine, with four looking at major depressive disorder and one at bipolar individuals enduring a major depressive episode, yet they varied widely in design. Due to these differences, the University of Ottawa researchers opted to summarize the trials separately rather than create a single set of statistics across them.
The results between the studies did not tell a single, cohesive story. In two of the studies, researchers reported significant positive results on major depressive disorder by combining five grams of creatine with the antidepressant escitalopram daily. Similarly, another trial combining creatine with cognitive behavioral therapy showed a greater reduction in symptoms than the placebo group.
However, the remaining studies found no measurable benefit. One focused on individuals who had previously failed to respond to depression medications and likewise found that creatine did not improve their symptoms. Similarly, a study involving adolescent girls with major depressive disorder and another involving women with bipolar disorder reported no improvement. In the bipolar group, creatine not only failed to show benefits but also induced hypomania or mania in two participants.
The key to the discussion is a molecule called adenosine triphosphate, which carries energy to fuel biological processes. Creatine helps replenish that molecule in muscles, and since the brain uses more energy by volume than any other part of the body, it stands to reason that creatine would have a major impact on the brain.
Existing research into mood disorders has commonly identified changes in the brain’s creatine metabolism, leading to the suggestion that reduced energy production in the brain causes depression. Additionally, some speculate that creatine activates the same pathways targeted by antidepressants, but all links between mood and creatine remain correlational.
“The signal is interesting, but it is not a verdict,” said lead author Bassam Jeryous Fares, a student in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ottawa. “Two trials pointed one way, and three pointed another. That is not the kind of evidence on which you change clinical practice. It is the kind that tells you the question is worth further exploration.”
According to the researchers, their findings suggest creatine may represent a promising avenue for future depression research. However, they emphasize that these studies are only an early step, and much more work is needed to determine whether the supplement can play a meaningful role in treating mood disorders.
The paper, “Creatine as a Treatment for Depression,” appeared in Brain Medicine on June 30, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
During several recent conversations, people have told me that they've stopped checking their phones in the morning. Not because nothing was happening, but because everything was. They described the feeling as standing under a waterfall of perpetual bad news.
This experience is far from an isolated one. According to Reuters Institute's 2025 Digital News Report, 69% of Canadians at least occasionally avoid the news now.
Globally, 40% report they at least sometimes or often do the same, the highest figure ever recorded. People shared consistent reasons for this: the news put them in a bad mood, they felt overwhelmed and powerless to act.
As a researcher in developmental psychology, focusing on social development and psychological well-being, I argue that news fatigue is not laziness, weakness or a generational decline in civic interest. It's the predictable response of a human brain meeting an environment it was never designed to navigate.
Long before smartphones or even the printing press, our cognitive architecture was shaped by a single problem: stay alive long enough to reproduce. Our ancestors whose attention drifted past the rustle in the grass left fewer descendants than those who froze, looked and listened.
The brain that paid attention to threats was the brain that survived.
This is the foundation of what psychologists call the negativity bias, one of the most replicated findings in cognitive science. Across decades of research, the human mind has been shown to weigh negative information more heavily than positive, attend to it faster and remember it longer.
A predator nearby mattered more than a beautiful sunset. The cost of missing a real threat was death, while the cost of overreacting was a few minutes of wasted vigilance. The asymmetry made this bias adaptive.
Here is the problem: the human brain has not changed since then. We are the same species as we were thousands of years ago. What's changed is the size of the world it's asked to scan for threats.
For most of human history, the threats our nervous system processed were local. A neighbouring tribe. A drought. The illness of a child we personally knew. Information about distant places would barely arrive, and if it did, it was mainly irrelevant.
In 2026, the same neurological system is being asked to absorb a war in one region, a financial shock in another, a climate disaster in a third and a violent crime in a fourth, all before lunchtime.
A study published in the scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour examined more than 105,000 real news headlines viewed nearly six million times. Each additional negative word increased click-through rates, while positive words had the opposite effect.
Recent studies suggest people around the world demonstrate measurably stronger physiological responses to negative news than to positive news. The body is reacting before the mind has decided whether the threat is relevant.
Some researchers have introduced a clinical framework for what happens in this instance called Problematic News Consumption (PNC) — a pattern of news engagement that results in preoccupation, dysregulation and disruption to daily functioning. In their 2022 study, the researchers found that 17% of American adults qualified as having severe levels of PNC. Among that group, 61% reported feeling unwell quite a bit or very much, compared with 6% of those who didn't.
For minority populations, news fatigue may be even more consequential.
Repeatedly witnessing harm directed at our own groups, even when we're not the immediate target, can have a significant psychological impact on people from the same group affiliation. For racialized communities, such as immigrants, the cognitive load could be even heavier, and the option to simply stop watching is much harder to exercise when the news is about their country of origin.
What's the solution to news fatigue? Well, it's not avoidance. A democracy depends on informed citizens.
Many adults already cite the spread of misleading information as a major source of stress. Withdrawing from accurate, trustworthy information only deepens the problem. We're wired to pay more attention to bad news, and that kind of content will find its way to us one way or another.
The fix is to manage the consumption and the sources.
Several approaches can help manage news fatigue and protect mental health. Containing news consumption to defined windows of time reduces the sense of being overwhelmed. Choosing depth over volume also matters: one carefully reported long-form article will inform you better than bursts of random, unreliable and emotionally loaded posts on Instagram.
There is also value in distinguishing between information and action — research on perceived control and stress consistently shows that the gap between awareness and agency is one of the strongest predictors of psychological distress. Identifying what you can actually do about what you read in the news, however small, regulates that response.
Finally, be wary of "rage bait" — intentionally provocative messages or content designed to boost engagement on social media platforms by eliciting negative reactions. Recognizing that certain content creators want to provoke rather than reflect reality creates useful cognitive distance.
The news will not become less "heavy." But our relationship with it can become more deliberate. Our brains were not built for this scale of input. They were, however, built to learn to adapt.
This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
In a laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Boston, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick asked mothers to play with their babies for a few minutes, then drop their faces into a blank, expressionless mask. The infants, most of them under a year old, did everything they could to bring their mothers back. They smiled. They pointed. They screeched. They threw both hands up in a small, urgent gesture that looked, in slow motion, like a question: what is happening here?
That experiment is now called the Still-Face Paradigm, and it produced one of the most quietly radical findings in developmental psychology. Tronick’s later micro-coded studies of mother-infant interaction suggested that even in healthy, securely attached pairs, the two are out of emotional sync roughly 70 percent of the time. The match is the exception. The mismatch is the rule.
What separates the secure babies from the insecure ones is not how often the connection lands. It is how often it gets repaired.
Before Tronick, the dominant image of a good mother was a kind of emotional metronome — perfectly attuned, perfectly responsive, perfectly available. The still-face study turned that picture inside out.
Tronick filmed hundreds of mother-infant dyads frame by frame. He coded micro-expressions, gaze direction, vocal pitch, the timing of a head turn. What he found was that even the warmest, most engaged pairs spent most of their interaction time slightly off. The mother looked away as the baby looked up. The baby cooed as the mother adjusted a sleeve. They missed each other constantly. And then, often within a second or two, they found each other again.
Tronick described three phases that played out in his lab. The good was the moment of attuned exchange — the baby smiles, the mother smiles back, the loop closes. The bad was the still face itself, the rupture, the moment a baby’s posture collapses and her gaze drops. The ugly was something else entirely: according to Tronick’s research, the most damaging scenario is when there is no opportunity for repair, when the child stays stuck in the distressed state without reparation.
The rupture itself was not the wound. The absence of repair was. That distinction reframes nearly every parenting mistake a tired adult has ever made. Snapping at a toddler in a grocery aisle is a rupture. Walking out of the room mid-tantrum is a rupture. Looking at a phone when a child is mid-sentence is a rupture. None of these, on their own, damages attachment. What damages attachment is the rupture that never gets stitched back together.
The 70 percent figure comes from Tronick’s micro-analytic coding of normal, securely attached mother-infant pairs. It is a baseline, not a failure rate. In the underlying work with Jeffrey Cohn, published in Child Development in 1989, the pairs spent only a small fraction of their playtime in genuinely coordinated states, cycling between matched and mismatched roughly every few seconds. Even the most competent caregivers were misreading their babies more often than they were reading them correctly.
The reason this is good news is mechanical. A baby raised in perfect synchrony would never learn the skill that matters most — how to come back from disconnection. Repair is a muscle. It only develops if it is used.
The predictive variable for secure attachment is not the frequency of attuned moments. It is the rate at which a dyad recovers from misattuned ones. Babies who experienced consistent repair learned, at a pre-verbal level, that disconnection was survivable. Babies who did not learned the opposite.
In the still-face videos, the sequence is almost unbearable to watch. A baby will try every social tool she has. She smiles. She vocalizes. She reaches. When none of it works, she does something stranger — she begins to self-soothe. She sucks her thumb. She turns her head away. She slumps. Her body learns, in the space of two minutes, that the social channel is offline.
Tronick characterized this withdrawal as adaptive rather than ominous — a way for an infant to conserve energy and self-protect when repeated bids for connection fail. Later neuroscience has traced how the presence or absence of a caregiver tunes an infant’s developing stress circuitry, work reviewed in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. The infant is not breaking. She is budgeting. She is learning that effort in this particular direction does not pay.
Multiply that across thousands of interactions over the first three years, and you get something close to a working model of relationships. Connection is reliable, or it is not. Repair is possible, or it is not.
What gets transmitted across a repair is more important than what gets transmitted across a match. In a matched moment, the baby learns: you see me. In a repaired moment, the baby learns something harder and more durable: when you stop seeing me, you come back.
That second lesson is the foundation of what attachment researchers call earned security. Adults who can tolerate conflict, sit with rupture, and trust that a partner will return after a hard conversation tend to have been raised by caregivers who modeled exactly that — not perfection, but reliable return. The inverse is also documented: where the early pattern was rupture without repair, the nervous system learned, before it had words, that the gap between disconnection and reconnection was unbridgeable.
A generation of parents has been told that any rupture is a rupture too far — that a raised voice, a moment of impatience, a snapped no will leave a mark. Tronick’s data says the opposite. The rupture is normal. The rupture is, in fact, the precondition for the most important developmental work a baby does. A parent who is never frustrated, never short, never blank-faced is not modeling a human being. They are modeling a vending machine. And the child who grows up watching a vending machine does not learn how to handle the day, years later, when the people they love turn out to be people.
The piece of parenting that turns out to matter most is the part nobody films. The apology two hours after the snap. The hand on the shoulder after the door has been slammed. The quiet sentence — I was wrong to talk to you like that — delivered without performance. That sentence, repeated across childhood, is what builds the working model of a world where mistakes are recoverable.
The reason repair is so load-bearing becomes clearest in its absence. Writing in Psychology Today, clinicians who work with adult children of narcissistic mothers describe a recurring pattern. The mother withdraws affection. The child performs harder. The mother eventually returns, but without ever naming the rupture, without acknowledgment, without the small sentence that closes the loop. The child of that dynamic does not learn that rupture is survivable. They learn that rupture is their fault, and that reconnection is contingent on performance — an imprint that shows up decades later as hypersensitivity to any sign of withdrawal, and an inability to trust the return when it comes.
Decades after the original experiment, the still-face paradigm is now used in clinics to screen for risk in infant mental health. A 2009 review and meta-analysis covering dozens of studies documents how researchers have adapted the procedure across clinical and at-risk infant samples. The protocol is simple — a few minutes of normal play, a brief still-face, then reunion — but what gets coded is the reunion. How fast does the baby re-engage? How quickly does the mother re-attune? Does repair happen at all?
Therapists working with new parents now teach the rupture-repair cycle as an explicit skill. The training is not how to avoid mistakes. The training is how to come back from them — how to name what happened, how to make the body language match the words, how to let a small child see an adult acknowledge a misstep without collapsing into shame.
What Tronick uncovered in a windowless lab turns out to describe something larger than mother-infant pairs. It describes the basic mechanics of every close relationship a person will have. Couples therapists talk about it. Friendship researchers talk about it. The pattern is the same — rupture is inevitable, and repair is the variable that determines whether the bond holds.
The Orion Magazine essay that opens with Tronick’s still-face footage frames connection in nearly cosmological terms, as a binding force that works through resonance, repetition, and variation. The variation is the point. The misses are the point. The thing that looks like failure — the 70 percent of the time when one person reaches and the other looks away — turns out to be the medium through which the real work happens.
The babies in Tronick’s original footage are in their early fifties now. Some of them are parents themselves. Some are grandparents. The micro-expressions captured on those reels — the screech, the raised hands, the slow collapse and faster recovery — became the data that reshaped how an entire field thinks about love.
What the footage shows, in the end, is not a baby breaking. It is a baby waiting. The face goes blank. The baby works. The face comes back. The baby’s posture re-inflates in something close to real time, as if a small bellows had been filled. That moment of re-inflation — the second the connection comes back online — is the thing that, repeated thousands of times across a childhood, builds a person who can trust that other people will return.
The mismatch is most of the relationship. The repair is what makes the relationship hold.
The post In 1975, the developmental psychologist Edward Tronick filmed mothers dropping their faces into a blank mask and found that even securely attached pairs fall out of sync roughly seventy percent of the time, and that what holds the bond together is not the match but the repair that follows the rupture appeared first on Space Daily.
Chris Butler, the Honolulu-born surfer who renamed himself Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa and built a global Krishna-derived movement called Science of Identity, has reportedly not appeared in a verified public photograph since the mid-1980s. He reportedly stopped giving sit-down media interviews in 1977, the year his Hawaii following went from beach gatherings to organized ashram life, and the handful of grainy images that still circulate online, including the cover portraits used on his own audio cassettes, are now roughly four decades old. He is reportedly 78 years old, and almost no one outside his inner circle claims to know what he currently looks like.
That absence is the point of the movement, and the engine of its mystique.
Butler reportedly grew up in Honolulu in the 1950s, the son of a prominent local doctor and anti-war activist. He was reportedly a competitive surfer on Oahu’s North Shore in the 1960s, drifted through LSD and Vedanta, and around 1970 became a disciple of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, who gave him the Sanskrit name he still uses on cassette labels and book jackets.
By the early 1970s Butler was running his own offshoot in Hawaii, drawing a few hundred followers to lectures in Honolulu apartments and Kailua living rooms. He was photographed often during this period. He wore the saffron robes, the shaved head with the single tuft of hair at the back, and the painted clay markings on the forehead common to ISKCON monks.
Something shifted in 1977. By most accounts from former members, Butler scaled back his public lectures that year and moved into a residence in Kailua, and the movement reorganized around audio cassettes of his talks rather than in-person darshan. Followers gathered in homes to listen to the tapes together. He did not disappear overnight, though. Through the 1980s he hosted a late-night Hawaii television program, Chris Butler Speaks, on which he delivered spiritual and theological lectures. It was only from the 1990s onward that he withdrew from public view almost entirely.
He reportedly gave one extended interview to a Honolulu reporter around the late 1970s. He has reportedly given no comparable on-the-record interview since. Requests from major media outlets over the following decades were reportedly either ignored or routed through intermediaries who declined on his behalf.
The clearest surviving portraits of him date from a small window in the early-to-mid 1980s, the same era as the television show. After that, the visual record essentially stops. A 1990s photograph occasionally surfaces in former-member forums, but its provenance is disputed.
Science of Identity Foundation, the nonprofit Butler reportedly founded in 1977, distributes his teachings through recorded lectures, books published under the Siddhaswarupananda name, and a network of affiliated yoga and meditation studios. The movement has claimed adherents across Hawaii, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.
Followers describe a structure in which Butler’s voice is constant and his face is absent. New initiates may spend years inside the organization without ever seeing a recent photograph of him. The cassettes carry the same 1980s cover portrait. The MP3 files that replaced them carry the same portrait scanned to digital.
The pattern is a familiar one in accounts of charismatic movements: the deliberate cultivation of distance. The leader becomes a voice, a doctrine, a felt presence. The body recedes.
Most of what the wider public knows about Butler arrived through political coverage of Tulsi Gabbard. Gabbard was reportedly raised inside the Science of Identity community in Hawaii. Her father, Mike Gabbard, was reportedly a prominent Butler follower before his own political career. When Tulsi Gabbard ran for Congress in 2012, then for president in 2020, then was nominated as Director of National Intelligence in 2024, reporters tried to photograph her childhood guru and were unable to do so.
Major publications including The New Yorker, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and New York Magazine have published profiles attempting to describe Butler. None of them included a current photograph. Every illustration in those pieces used the same handful of decades-old images, sometimes cropped, sometimes color-corrected, always old.
The psychology of absence has been studied for years in the context of celebrity, romance, and authority. The scarcity principle in social perception holds that people assign greater value and intensity to figures who are harder to reach. The harder it is to see someone, the larger they tend to become in the imagination of those who wait. A guru you cannot photograph is, by that logic, more compelling than one who shows up on Instagram.
A related strand of work on attraction and what psychologists describe as love’s scarcity principle suggests that limited availability tends to signal importance, and that the absence of fresh information can produce a more intense bond than constant presence does. The pattern, first mapped in romantic relationships, translates to spiritual organizations with little distortion.
Accounts collected over the past decade from people who left the movement describe a community organized around a leader they rarely saw. Senior followers, sometimes called the inner circle, would occasionally travel to meet him. Rank-and-file members would not.
Some former members say they spent ten or fifteen years in the organization without ever being in the same room as Butler. They listened to him every day on tape. They quoted him. They prayed to a photograph of him taken before they were born.
One former follower said she had no idea what her guru’s voice sounded like at his current age. Only what it sounded like in 1982.
If you search for Chris Butler today, you will find perhaps a dozen distinct images. A young surfer at Sunset Beach. A robed monk lecturing in Honolulu in 1972. A close-up portrait used on cassette covers, undated but stylistically consistent with the early 1980s. A long-lens photograph that may be from the 1990s and may not be him at all.
There is no verified photograph of him aged 60. None aged 70. None aged 78, which is his current age. The man who has shaped the daily life of thousands of households for half a century is, visually, a person who stopped existing during the Reagan administration.
Historical figures whose visual record is incomplete tend to be remembered through whichever image dominates the archive. Lincoln is the bearded president, not the clean-shaven lawyer. Einstein is the white-haired Princeton sage, not the patent clerk. Butler is the young Hawaiian monk on the cassette cover, because that is the only Butler the archive contains.
Butler is widely reported to live in Kailua, on the windward side of Oahu, in a residential property owned through trusts associated with the Science of Identity Foundation. Reporters have described high walls, mature vegetation, and no visible activity. Neighbors have reportedly said they have lived next door for decades and have never seen him.
The property is roughly seven miles from Waikiki Beach, where he learned to surf in the 1950s.
Forty years of visual silence is an unusual span. It covers the entire commercial history of the internet. It covers the introduction of the camcorder, the digital camera, the camera phone, the selfie, and the doorbell camera. A person who has not been photographed in forty years has, in effect, opted out of the visual era of human history.
The cassettes still play. The yoga studios still open in the mornings. The portrait on the cover, taken when Ronald Reagan was in his first term, is still the face that thousands of followers picture when they close their eyes to chant. The man himself, somewhere behind the wall in Kailua, is now closer in age to his own teacher Prabhupada at death than to the young surfer in the photograph.
The image does not age. The movement, organized around it, does not need it to.
The post Chris Butler stepped out of public view a generation ago and reportedly hasn’t given a real interview in decades — the clearest photos of the reclusive Hawaii guru are now roughly 40 years old appeared first on Space Daily.
New research spanning five continents and vastly different cultures -- from the steppes of Mongolia to the rainforests of the Pacific -- shows that hunting dogs and their owners cooperate, communicate and rely on each other in nearly identical ways, suggesting the relationship was forged in deep evolutionary time, perhaps 30,000 years ago.
The post Human-Dog Bond is Ancient, Universal and Strikingly the Same Everywhere: Study appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Adolescent appearance may predict survival into young adulthood, a new study suggests.
A growing body of evidence suggests that leaving Earth may do far more than challenge the human body. According to a new study, the absence of gravity itself could temporarily reshape consciousness, loosening the brain’s most strongly ingrained assumptions and opening the door to altered perceptions, expanded awareness, and even experiences that resemble some aspects of psychedelic states.
As humanity prepares for longer stays on the Moon, commercial space tourism, and eventual missions to Mars, researchers contend that understanding what happens to the mind in microgravity may be just as important as understanding the engineering that gets astronauts there. According to them, gravity may not simply keep people anchored to the ground—it may also help anchor human consciousness itself.
In a new paper published in Frontiers in Psychology, researchers Dr. Annahita Nezami and Dr. Elisa Raffaella Ferre of Birkbeck, University of London, explored decades of neuroscience, psychology, and spaceflight research to propose that Earth’s gravitational pull acts as a deeply embedded “super-prior” within the brain. By disrupting this ancient reference point, microgravity may trigger widespread changes across neural networks that underpin perception, self-awareness, and emotional regulation.
“Human consciousness has evolved under the constant pull of terrestrial gravity, yet its role in shaping perception and awareness has received limited theoretical attention,” researchers write. “As spaceflight transitions from short missions to long-duration habitation, understanding how consciousness responds to non-terrestrial gravity becomes increasingly urgent.”
Every human brain evolved under the constant force of Earth’s gravity. From before birth onward, sensory systems constantly rely on gravity cues to determine which way is up, where the body is in space, and how to interpret movement.
Researchers argue that this constant exposure has made gravity one of the brain’s most reliable assumptions. In the language of predictive neuroscience, the brain constantly generates expectations about the world and updates them using incoming sensory information. Gravity, they say, functions as a basic expectation—a “1G super-prior”—that helps stabilize consciousness.
Remove that constant, and things begin to change.
In orbit, vestibular signals from the inner ear become unreliable. Visual, proprioceptive, and balance information no longer align as the brain evolved to expect. The resulting mismatch generates anticipation errors, forcing widespread recalibration.
Those changes are already well documented among astronauts. Space travelers commonly experience spatial disorientation, altered body perception, sleep disturbances, mood swings, and, in some cases, feelings of depersonalization or derealization—states in which individuals feel separated from themselves or perceive their surroundings as unreal.
Astronauts have also reported more positive and profound experiences. Many describe feeling “unmoored,” “expanded,” and deeply interconnected with humanity, or overwhelmed by awe while viewing Earth from orbit. This phenomenon, known as the Overview Effect, has been associated with lasting shifts in values, increased environmental concern, and enhanced feelings of oneness.
The study suggests that these experiences might originate from the same neurocognitive processes triggered when gravity’s stabilizing role is weakened.
“By perturbing the most stable embodied reference – gravity itself – spaceflight offers a rare window into how fundamental expectations shape consciousness,” researchers write. “The loosening of perceptual boundaries in microgravity has been proposed as a neurocognitive foundation for the Overview Effect.”
Brain imaging studies lend support to the idea. MRI scans of astronauts before and after extended-duration missions have revealed structural changes, including fluid redistribution, enlargement of brain ventricles, and gray matter remodeling. Functional MRI studies have also found changes in connectivity among vestibular, sensory, and default mode network regions involved in awareness and the combining of internal and external information.
Especially intriguing are changes observed in the default mode network, a system involved in introspection, self-referential thought, and consciousness. Activity inside this network appears to diminish after spaceflight, with some changes persisting for months after astronauts return to Earth.
Electroencephalography studies have likewise detected reductions in alpha-wave activity during and after missions, another sign that brain function is being reorganized in response to microgravity.
These neural changes led the researchers to an unexpected comparison.
Many of the same large-scale patterns recorded after spaceflight resemble effects previously documented under psychedelic compounds such as psilocybin and LSD. In both situations, highly organized brain networks appear to loosen, while communication between previously separate regions increases.
Researchers stress that the mechanisms are entirely different. Psychedelics act through serotonin receptors, whereas microgravity represents an environmental disruption rather than a pharmacological one. Yet both seem to converge by weakening the brain’s highest-level assumptions and increasing the combination of sensory information.
According to researchers, this convergence phenomenon suggests that spaceflight could provide scientists with a natural, drug-free model for studying transformative states of consciousness.
The researchers argue that terrestrial gravity, microgravity, and psychedelic states may represent different conditions along a spectrum defined by the strength of the brain’s deeply ingrained “1G super-prior.” As that stabilizing role weakens, top-down constraints relax, potentially increasing neuroplasticity and mental flexibility.
The implications go beyond astronaut health. Understanding how consciousness changes in unfamiliar environments may provide new clues to the neural foundations of self-awareness. It could also prove increasingly important as private citizens spend more time in space and human settlements expand away from Earth.
Researchers suggest that microgravity offers scientists something that cannot be replicated on Earth—a chance to observe what happens when one of evolution’s oldest assumptions suddenly disappears.
“By situating consciousness in an environment for which evolution offers no precedent, spaceflight positions microgravity as a powerful natural neurocognitive catalyst for transformative experience,” researchers write. “In stepping beyond Earth’s gravity, we gain a unique vantage point from which to examine the contingent foundations of human awareness and the conditions under which it can be fundamentally transformed.”
Tim McMillan is a retired law enforcement executive, investigative reporter and co-founder of The Debrief. His writing typically focuses on defense, national security, the Intelligence Community and topics related to psychology. You can follow Tim on Twitter: @LtTimMcMillan. Tim can be reached by email: tim@thedebrief.org or through encrypted email: LtTimMcMillan@protonmail.com
Foreign veterans fighting in Ukraine face intense combat, serious mental health challenges, and limited access to care, leaving many without adequate support. Drone strikes, trench combat, and constant frontline danger have become defining features of the war in Ukraine. Now, a new UK study suggests that foreign military veterans who volunteered to fight in the [...]
Brexit is now 10 years old, but what many Remainers still fail to see, says Professor James Alexander, is that their cause was doomed from the start, for the word 'Leave' is eminently more appealing than 'Remain'.
The post Why Remain Lost, Why Leave Won appeared first on The Daily Sceptic.
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