Like a cocktail partygoer able to focus on one discussion in a noisy room, brains are able to make reliable connections against a busy neural background. Here are two phenomena that help it happen.
Have you ever walked into a room and realised you can’t remember what you were looking for? We tend to do this more when we are thinking of a few things at once or doing two things at the same time.
BMIs like the ones Neuralink is working on are already used in laboratories around the world as assistive technologies. But melding your mind with an AI is probably not happening anytime soon.
Our brains create new memories, and forget old ones, by forging and breaking connections between nerve cells. Now researchers can do something similar using a light-sensitive electronic chip.
The ‘right’ amount of noise is different for everyone. That might explain why some people perform best in noisy environments, while others prefer silence.
Most of the time, different parts of your nervous system work in balance. But sometimes things can get out of whack – and that’s when you might end up experiencing what medics call syncope.
The process of radicalisation is a complex system that cannot be reduced to the brain, behaviour, or environment. It exists at the intersection of all these elements.