Analysis of neuroimaging datasets across five major psychedelics revealed a shared brain signature and provides a comprehensive insight into how these drugs reorganize brain architecture.

Public health chaos and research funding cuts are inspiring nationwide pro-science protests against the Trump administration

Those with the condition tend to struggle in the domains where AI excels, and vice versa.

Over the last two decades, research in cognitive neuroscience has revealed that insight problem-solving is characterised by a temporally structured sequence of neural events. Preparatory brain states – marked by anterior cingulate engagement and reductions in visual sampling, including increased blinking – appear to prime the cognitive system for the restructuring that insight later requires. As the moment of solution approaches, a second period of sensory gating further limits interference from the external environment, facilitating weakly activated associations to cohere and break into awareness, a transition associated with right anterior superior temporal gyrus activity and pupillary dilation. Moreover, insight has been found to be related to the dopaminergic system, a finding that helps explain the characteristic affective ‘Aha!’ response as well as why insights are accompanied by a feeling of pleasure and are better remembered. Taken together, the evidence points to insight being supported by an evolutionarily shaped system that promotes exploratory behaviour and strengthens effective problem-solving responses.

YouTube video by The Science of Creativity with Dr. Keith Sawyer

BMC Psychology - Insights, or "Aha!" moments, are a crucial aspect of idea generation in creative cognition. While functional neuroimaging studies have identified brain regions involved...

Recent research reported that the entropy and determinism of pupillary diameter fluctuations differentiated children who solved an insight problem fro…

YouTube video by TEDx Talks

From December 22nd to January 2nd, we’ll be revisiting some of our most listened to Think conversations of 2025. If you missed ’em the first time, this is a great way to catch up!

npj Mental Health Research - Unexpected events and prosocial behavior: the Batman effect

Nature asked researchers who use artificial intelligence how its propensity for people-pleasing affects their work — and what they are doing to mitigate it.

Most people are biased to negatively judge people with facial anomalies. How does popular cinema reinforce this psychological effect?

In these financially straitened times, funders must recognize that great discoveries often arise from work that was looking for something completely different.

Abstract. Conspiracy theories have pervaded human thought across time and cultures, often emerging during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, where they influenced public behaviors and attitudes, no...

Many hold that visual experience is sparse and its richness illusory, relying on high-level summaries rather than detailed content. However, we argue here that seeing is more than this – it is unfatho...

Adults selectively avoid useful information. We examined the development of information avoidance in 5- to 10-year-old American children (N = 320). In Experimen...