You saw me carrying our baby and food. There was more happening in our family that night.

As the years pass, it gets harder and harder to believe that Mark Sandman was a real guy — that he made the music that he did, that he looked like that, that he was actually named Mark Sandman, and th...

Watch now (65 mins) | I talk with the best-selling author about his new fake history of 20th century rock music

In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Is This It,’ Steven Hyden looks back on how the New York band’s debut, and the laudatory reactions to it, fit into the early-2000s rock landscape

What is it like to be a student in Alpha School’s high school boot camp?

A new study offers more evidence that America’s biggest sport produces life-altering head trauma. The NFL will never turn itself off, so it’s on fans to do so

University of California, Irvine is hiring. Apply now!

American ‘woke’-fighter takes Maarten Boudry’s place.

The social consequences of hereditarianism

Spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity are thought to underlie mind-wandering, moments when mental experience becomes unrelated to what one is currently doing. A large body of research has investigated ongoing neural oscillations in the alpha band (7–14 Hz), reflecting changes in arousal and attention. However, studies disagree whether the power of alpha oscillations increases or decreases during mind-wandering compared with on-task focus. We hypothesized that these opposite effects arise from differences in eye state across studies, as eye closure increases alpha power and can reverse alpha's relationship with sleepiness, which is itself related to mind-wandering. To test this, we recorded electroencephalography while male and female participants with eyes either open or closed were probed to report whether they were focused on the auditory attention task or mind-wandering and how alert or sleepy they were. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that increased alpha power was more likely to precede mind-wandering and sleepiness in the eyes-open group but less likely in the eyes-closed group. A systematic literature review largely replicated these opposite relationships across eye states in different paradigms. We propose that these results reflect an inverted-U relationship between alpha power and mind-wandering, formed by a positive relationship at low alpha power values typical of eyes-open states and a negative relationship at high alpha power values typical of eyes-closed states. By sampling alpha power across eye states in the same paradigm, this work reconciles contradictions in prior literature and clarifies how ongoing neural oscillations reflect the stream of mental experiences.

After an AI detector classified one of my opinion pieces as entirely AI-generated, I found myself questioning where authorship ends, where expertise begins and what readers deserve to know.

Deceptive package coloring fools the eye

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