#the brain

The Memory Maker

Recently, OpenAI sunsetted their immersive video ap, Sora, but the false memories it helped create will remain. Today, for Longreads, neuroscientist Tim Requarth explores how Sora helped users to believe they had done things they quite clearly had not. 

Of course, there’s one big difference between Loftus’s memory of the house fire and Deutsch’s fanciful scaling of Lincoln’s nose. One was real, the other wasn’t. Not only unreal, but unlikely. “I would make a distinction between something that’s plausible and implausible,” she said. “If suddenly there’s a picture of you in a Russian prison in Siberia and you’ve never been, you’re obviously going to be able to reject it. Maybe you’ll have a weird feeling seeing yourself, but you’re just going to know you’ve never been.”

Fair enough. I started to think that maybe it’s a stretch to say that Deutsch’s “twitch of confusion” is anything to be concerned about. But then I talked to another Sora user and things got weirder.

Mike Mignola — Hell, Ink and Water: The Art of Mike Mignola part one “Hellboy” (2024) Source

Iceberg - Cover for "In The Mad Mountains: Stories Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft" (2024)

Hellboy II

The Thing on the Roof

Old Vampire

Witchfinder Omnibus

Robert “What the #@&% is That? The Saga Anthology of the Monstrous and the Macabre”

The Merciful Heart Society

The Inspired

The exact nature of long COVID is still coming to light, but we just got some of the best evidence yet that this debilitating condition stems from a brain injury. Using high-resolution scanners, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have shown microscopic, structural abnormalities in the brainstems of those recovering from COVID-19. Signs of brain inflammation were present up to 18 months after first contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

New research reveals that bumble bees (Bombus terrestris) are much more cognitively advanced than previously thought:

We've known for a while that they play with balls, count, recognize faces, and even feel rhythm. Now we know they can achieve one of the highest peaks of cognitive performance: spontaneously solving problems.

And like the chimps in prior research, using a tool was the bees’ own idea.

"This is essentially an insect version of the classic ‘box-and-banana’ problem," study author Olli Loukola said.

"The animal must realize that an object can be repositioned and then used as a tool to reach an otherwise inaccessible goal."

And then they did it.

This is the first research proving bees can have insights on par with large-brained vertebrates. It’s remarkable when you consider the vast difference in brain size - a bee’s 1 million neurons are capable of the same goal-oriented problem-solving as a chimp’s 2.8 billion.

Imagine the implications! How might you use this discovery for worldbuilding fantasy creatures and science-fiction aliens?

original paper in the journal Science: X