perception

Imagine spending a weekend afternoon with friends at an art museum: nodding with crossed arms, desperately searching for something insightful to say. The vast majority of paintings you stroll past are immediately forgotten, but some stick in your mind. As it turns out, the paintings you remember are likely the same ones everyone else does.There’s a scientific term for that: image memorability. “It’s the idea that, essentially, there are some intrinsic patterns that make some content more memorable than others,” says…

Champalimaud Research’s Learning Lab has provided significant evidence of how the brain’s internal clockwork guides behavior. Their study manipulated neural activity patterns in rats, warping their perception of time duration. This research not only challenges conventional understanding of time measurement but also has potential therapeutic implications for diseases like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, and for robotics and learning algorithms.The Learning Lab at Champalimaud Research has discovered a way to manipulate the…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Everyone knows that 2 + 2 = 4, but why do we have arithmetic in the first place, and why is it true? Researchers at the University of Canterbury have recently answered these questions by "reverse engineering" arithmetic from a psychological perspective. To do this, they considered all possible ways that quantities could be combined, and proved (for the first time in mathematical terms) that…

Researchers from UPV, UPC, and ICFO have discovered “Photonic snake states,” marking a significant advancement in the study of light and its manipulation. The finding, published in Nature Photonics, opens up new possibilities in the formation of frequency combs and paves the way for advanced applications in fields like communication, spectroscopy, metrology, and quantum computing.Researchers from UPV, UPC, and ICFO, in Spain, discover photonic snakes, a new instrument for unveiling the secrets of light.Light, with its…

The tiny foragers are also “remarkable learners” that can remember something after a single exposure to it, Crossley said. In the new study, the researchers peered deep into the snails’ brains to figure out what happened at the neurological level when they were acquiring memories.Coaxing MemoriesIn their experiments, the researchers gave the snails two forms of training: strong and weak. During strong training, they first sprayed the snails with banana-flavored water, which the snails treated as neutral in its appeal:…

Khloé Kardashian was left astonished by her mother Kris Jenner's lack of awareness when it came to the pricing of fast food. Kardashian food chronicles. (Image Credit: Instagram/ Khloé Kardashian/ Kris Jenner)(Instagram) The incident took place during a girls' trip to Las Vegas to celebrate Kim Kardashian's 42nd birthday. Unfortunately, their private flight was disrupted by bad weather and turbulence, forcing them to return to Los Angeles. As an alternative plan, they decided to visit In-N-Out Burger in L.A. to…

Human olfactory receptors belong to an enormous family of proteins known as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs). Situated within cell membranes, these proteins contribute to a vast array of physiological processes by detecting all kinds of stimuli, from light to hormones.Over the past two decades, researchers have determined detailed structures for an ever-expanding number of GPCRs—but not for the olfactory receptors among them. To get enough receptors for these studies, researchers must produce them in cultured cells.…

First, it races away unstoppably—then it seems to stand still. Our perception of time is anything but constant. Two new studies suggest our heartbeat can cause passing moments to drag or fly. The experiments, led by separate research groups, have uncovered complementary findings. Together, their work confirms that the heart’s activity influences our perception of time as it passes. “It shows that you can’t look at in isolation from the body,” says cognitive neuroscientist Irena Arslanova of Royal Holloway, University of…

A little bit of exercise can help keep pain in check, researchers in Norway have found. Their newly published study suggests that physically active people have a higher pain tolerance on average than those who are sedentary, while higher levels of physical activity might further increase people’s tolerance.Sean Gunn’s Favorite Songs from the Guardians SeriesUnfortunately for anyone who hates sweating and chafing, exercise is one of the best things you can do to stay healthy. Research has also shown that it can help…

Around 17 million Americans had chronic pain so bad in 2021 that it drastically interfered with their lives, according to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The analysis estimates that nearly 52 million American adults—about one in every five—suffered from chronic pain in 2021.Won’t Virtual Reality Make Me Sick?CDC researchers examined recent data collected from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an in-person survey of households meant to be representative of the country as a…