For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain. Brain networks—the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention, or our sense of self, and more—loosen and start talking to each other all at once. EEG traces get noisier and more complex. “Think of the networks of the brain as highways,” says Devon Stoliker, a neuroscientist at Monash University. “Under psychedelics, these highways break down into many different directions.”
In a recent Nature study, Stoliker’s team designed an experiment to test whether these directions are truly chaotic and random. Researchers gathered 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic before, gave them 19 milligrams of psilocybin, a common psychedelic found in certain fungi, and scanned their brains. Then, they used AI to analyze the drugged and sober brain scans. What emerged was not exactly chaos.
An uninterrupted trip
Stoliker thinks chaos is not a satisfactory explanation for psychedelics’ effect on the brain. “It never really explained why an individual would have a meaningful experience, why they might have insight, why they might experience clarity, and why these might translate into positive psychological changes,” Stoliker says. To investigate if there are other explanations, he and his colleagues designed a study called PsiConnect.
Since the days of Dr. Alzheimer himself, there has been a dream that severe senility might have an explanation — and a cure. The search for both has never been more urgent.
While neurotechnologies have become powerful clinical tools for patients with brain injuries, the United Nations on Thursday warned that future technologies could be abused by governments.
OpenAI will begin automatically watermarking text generated with ChatGPT in the European Union, the company has announced. It will also offer the watermarking feature in other regions, but it will be off by default outside of the EU.
The move in Europe is driven by a need to comply with the EU AI Act, which took effect in August. It requires marking content produced by AI models in a way that another tool can detect. Unfortunately, there is still no completely effective and reliable way to do that. A few standards already exist, like SynthID and the C2PA project, but they are relatively easy to circumvent for anyone with basic know-how.
The same is likely true for OpenAI's watermark. Its method is proprietary; the company calls it textGrain, and has published a technical paper explaining how it works. But in general, it works like other LLM watermarking tools we've seen in the past: It puts patterns in the word choices that are not clear to a human reader and that don't meaningfully change the general quality of the output, but that someone with a key can use a specialized detector to find. OpenAI says it will be giving access to the detector to a limited number of researchers and organizations and providing a request-for-approval process for others to be added over time.
Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel were recognized for their work on light-gated ion channels and optogenetics, a technique that uses pulses of light to activate neurons in the brain.
We asked 100 scientists about unsolved problems in their fields. They sent back provocations — on the origins of life, the possibilities for human progress and much more.
Evidence suggests that it really affects what psychiatrists like me call sustained engagement — an important difference in understanding how to think about the condition.
The animals may help reveal the causes of brain disease in people and point the way to treatments. But researchers already are calling for new ethical guidelines.
Scientists simulated what happens when the pipes and tunnels that divert rainwater fail. In one scenario, 30 percent of local residents couldn’t reach an E.R.
They are moving too fast for the normal mind to keep up, but elite drivers have more densely packed brain cells where it counts and use their minds more efficiently.
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