• Experimental treatments use fMRI brain imaging to teach mental illness patients how to optimize their brain activity.
• Scientists analyzed 17 relevant studies with 410 total participants, and concluded that people can regulate their own brain activity when they see it in real time.
• The method is called neurofeedback, and it shows promise as a way to treat mental illness patients.
• However, the method has to be studied more in order to understand how it works, and how to unlock its potential as a treatment.

• In a conversation-based experiment with 252 strangers, researchers found that only in 2% cases both participants were happy with how long they talked.
• It’s probably because we hide our true intentions for fear of being rude, even though we’d like to end a conversation early.
• There was a big disconnect between what people wanted, and what they thought their conversation partners wanted.
• This suggests that we’re really bad at guessing what other people want.
• These findings show that we know very little about how conversations work, so it’s a great area for researchers to explore.

• Researchers find that people don’t know what to daydream about, but when they’re given directions - their pleasure from thinking increases by 50%.
• The way to find pleasure in daydreaming might be to consciously focus on positive, meaningful memories and thoughts.
• Daydreaming is a skill that you can get good at with practice, and once you do, it can be a way to never experience boredom again, and to finally be ok with your thoughts.
• Try it! Just don’t confuse daydreaming with planning (which is not pleasurable), make it a habit, and you may find that you’ll be able to re-shape your emotions.

• Neuroscientists achieve the unthinkable - talking to someone who’s asleep, and they’ve already done it with several people.
• Cross-national research team demonstrated two-way communication with lucid dreamers in the REM (rapid eye movement) sleep phase.
• Eye movements generate current, which is recorded by electrodes placed around the eyes, and the signals are translated to dialogue.
• Studying the mind during sleep used to be limited to people telling stories about their dreams after waking up, so this is a big gamechanger.
• Psychology experiments with sleeping people are now possible, and it could greatly enhance our understanding of consciousness and the mind’s abilities.

• Whether you perform best in the morning or evening depends on your chronotype - ‘larks’ work early, ‘night owls’ work late.
• Because night owls go to sleep later but have to get up early with everyone else, they incur sleep debt and need catch-up sleep on non-work days, which is bad for health.
• To explore this, researchers used data from a 1966 Finland birth cohort study, initially consisting of 12,058 children.
• At age 46, 2672 men and 3159 women from the study were questioned about their chronotypes in 2012, and monitored for 4 years afterwards.
• Compared to larks, owls had worse ratings for variables related to sleep and health, and were twice more likely to underperform at work.

• In a study of 20 participant’s brain activity and opinion-forming, researchers find that people are likely to conform to group opinion if their own is different.
• It’s possible that the brain foresees potential disagreements in the future, and subconsciously drives us to conform to popular opinions.
• This process involves the superior parietal cortex, a brain area that retrieves memories.
• The study suggests that the opinion of others literally changes our brain.

• Music’s benefits for the brain aren’t new, and this study provides further evidence that musical brains have better neural networks.
• In fact, any challenging skill that requires intensive, long-time training can improve how your brain is interconnected - even if you’re an adult.
• These findings come from a study of 150 brain scans with machine learning aid, where they counted the brain connections.
• All musician brains were a lot more structurally and functionally connected than non-musicians.

• We can’t predict the weather, among many other complex issues, because computers still can’t solve nonlinear equations.
• But this might change soon, as two different research teams created algorithms that can be used for nonlinear modelling on quantum computers.
• Their techniques still need refining, and won’t be real-world ready for years, but these studies are another stepping stone towards truly useful quantum algorithms.

Summary of the article:

• Teens unhappy about their looks are up to 285% more likely to develop depression later in life.
• This finding comes from a long-term study of ~4000 children born in 1991/2.
• At age 14, both boys and girls were mildly satisfied with their bodies, but girls were more dissatisfied.
• Body dissatisfaction at 14 predicted depressive episodes at 18, with the boys at much greater risk of severe depressive episodes.
• Study authors conclude that body dissatisfaction should be seen as a public health issue, and reducing it could lead to better mental health outcomes for young adults.

Summary of the article:

• Understanding code is neither done by language centers, nor by mathematical centers of the brain — it’s a whole different ball game.
• This comes from a researcher who’s studying how different cognitive functions relate to language processing parts of the brain.
• The study involved young programmers who analysed code while their brains were scanned.
• People either say that great coders are great at language, or great at maths - neither seems to be true, and there is no single specialized area that lights up from coding.
• The test activated the multiple demand network in participants’ brains, a wide network for performing mentally challenging tasks.