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....

David Bau is very familiar with the idea that computer systems are becoming so complicated it's hard to keep track of how they operate. 'I spent 20 years as a software engineer, working on really complex systems. And there's always this problem,' says Bau, a computer scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. But with conventional software, someone with inside knowledge can usually deduce what's going on, Bau says. If a website's ranking drops in a Google search, for example, someone at Google ' where Bau worked for a dozen years ' will have a good idea why. 'Here's what really terrifies me' about the current breed of artificial intelligence (AI), he says: 'there is no such understanding', even among the people building it. The latest wave of AI relies heavily on machine learning, in which software identifies patterns in data on its own, without being given any predetermined rules as to how to organize or classify the information. These patterns can be inscrutable to humans. The most advanced machine-learning systems use neural networks: software inspired by the architecture of the brain. They simulate layers of neurons, which transform information as it passes from layer to layer. As in human brains, these networks strengthen and weaken neural connections as they learn, but it's hard to see why certain connections are affected. As a result, researchers often talk about AI as 'black boxes', the inner workings of which are a mystery....