Severance, which imagines a world where a person's work and personal lives are surgically separated, returns Friday for its long-awaited second season. While the concept of this gripping piece of science fiction is far-fetched, it touches on a question neuroscience has been trying to answer for decades: Can a person's mind really be split in two' Remarkably, 'split-brain' patients have existed since the 1940s. To control epilepsy symptoms, these patients underwent a surgery to separate the left and right hemispheres. Similar surgeries still happen today. Later research on this type of surgery showed that the separated hemispheres of split-brain patients could process information independently. This raises the uncomfortable possibility that the procedure creates two separate minds living in one brain. In season one of Severance, Helly R (Britt Lower) experienced a conflict between her 'innie' (the side of her mind that remembered her work life) and her 'outie' (the side outside of work). Similarly, there is evidence of a conflict between the two hemispheres of real split-brain patients....

I am a psychiatrist who studies and treats fear and anxiety. One of my main mental health recommendations to my patients during the 2016 and 2020 election cycles was to reduce their political news consumption. I also tried to convince them that the five hours a day they spent watching cable news was only leaving them helpless and terrified. Over the past couple of years, though, I have noticed a change: Many of my patients say they either have tuned out or are too exhausted to do more than a brief read of political news or watch one hour of their favorite political show. Research supports my clinical experience: A Pew research study from 2020 showed that 66% of Americans were worn out by political stress. Interestingly, those who are not following the news feel that same news fatigue at an even higher percentage of 73%. In 2023, 8 out of 10 Americans described U.S. politics with negative words like 'divisive,' 'corrupt,' 'messy' and 'polarized.' In my 2023 book, 'AFRAID: Understanding the Purpose of Fear, and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety,' I discuss how American politicians and major news media have found an ally in fear: a very strong emotion that can be used to grab our attention, keeping us in the tribal dividing lines and making us follow, click, tap, watch and donate....

This instinctive reflex is shared by many furry mammals including mice, cats, squirrels, lions, tigers and bears. The move helps animals to remove water, insects or other irritants from hard-to-reach places. But underlying the shakes is a complex ' and previously mysterious ' neurological mechanism. Now, researchers have identified the neural circuit that triggers characteristic 'wet dog' shaking behaviour in mice ' which involves a specific class of touch receptors, and neurons that connect the spinal cord to the brain. Their findings were published in Science on 7 November1. 'The touch system is so complex and rich that [it] can distinguish a water droplet from a crawling insect from the gentle touch of a loved one,' says Kara Marshall, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. 'It's really remarkable to be able to link a very specific subset of touch receptors to this familiar and understandable behaviour.' The hairy skin of mammals is packed with more than 12 types of sensory neuron, each with a unique function to detect and interpret various sensations. Study co-author Dawei Zhang, a neuroscientist then at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues focused on a type of ultra-sensitive touch detecting receptors called C-fibre low-threshold mechanoreceptors (C-LTMRs), which wrap around hair follicles....

AIs are often described as 'black boxes' with researchers unable to to figure out how they 'think'. To better understand these often inscrutable systems, some scientists are borrowing from psychology and neuroscience to design tools to reverse-engineer them, which they hope will lead to the design of safer, more efficient AIs....