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Here's a claim that might ruin your week: you have never, in your entire life, experienced reality directly. Everything you've ever seen, heard, felt, tasted—all of it was your brain's guess about what was out there. A hallucination, constrained by sensory data. A

In 2001, a neurologist at Washington University named Marcus Raichle was staring at brain scans and getting frustrated. His data had a problem. Certain brain regions kept lighting up when they weren't supposed to—specifically, when subjects were doing nothing. Lying in the scanner between tasks. Waiting for

Here's a question that would have seemed crazy twenty years ago: What if depression is an inflammatory disease? The classic explanation for depression is a neurotransmitter imbalance—not enough serotonin, not enough norepinephrine, circuits that aren't firing correctly. The treatments follow logically: SSRIs boost serotonin, SNRIs

On January 28, 2024, Elon Musk tweeted: "The first human received an implant from Neuralink yesterday and is recovering well." That's it. That's how we found out that the most ambitious brain-computer interface project in history had put a chip in someone's

In 2012, a woman named Jan Scheuermann fed herself chocolate for the first time in nine years. Jan has spinocerebellar degeneration—a progressive disease that had taken away her ability to move anything below her neck. She couldn't scratch her nose, couldn't brush her teeth, couldn&

The Line Between Brain and Machine Is Already Blurring There's a man named Noland Arbaugh who plays chess on the internet. He plays Mario Kart. He scrolls through Reddit. He controls his computer cursor with his thoughts. Noland is quadriplegic. Eight years ago, a diving accident severed his

After seven articles exploring the frontiers of brain science—connectomics, optogenetics, glial cells, neuroinflammation, the default mode network, and predictive processing—it's time to step back and ask the harder question: What does any of this mean for understanding what we are? Because here's the thing