Latest news with #cognitiveNeuroscience
Daily Mail
26-05-2025
- Science
- Daily Mail
Scientist delivers ominous message to humanity after UFO covered in strange writing is found
A UFO researcher has an ominous message for humanity as governments around the world begin releasing more information about alleged contact with extraterrestrials. Dr Julia Mossbridge is a cognitive neuroscientist and a researcher of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) - the new term for UFOs and alien sightings. After scientists in Colombia recovered a mysterious, sphere-shaped object that many now believe is a piece of UFO technology, Mossbridge said the world is moving into an era which may soon have to deal with the knowledge that aliens exist. 'We are entering a time when we are starting to recognize as humans we don't have the control that we thought we had over everything,' Dr Mossbridge told Fox News. However, Mossbridge, who studies how humans think and also attended the May 1 congressional hearing on UAPs, said the impending disclosure of alien life could throw the worldview of many people into chaos. 'One of the mistakes we make is [saying], because I think I understand this, everything I think today is true,' the neuroscientist explained. 'It ends up making us very confused when something shows up that doesn't fit our model of the world,' she added. While the sphere in Colombia is convincing many that the public is finally looking at alien technology, Mossbridge actually remains skeptical that this discovery is a genuine UFO. The so-called ' UFO ' was spotted in March over the town of Buga, zig-zagging through the sky in a way that defies the movement of conventional aircraft 'The sphere itself seems kind of like an art project,' the UFO researcher said, adding that she believes it was created by humans, not aliens. Mossbridge noted that no direct connection has been made between a video of what's being called the Buga sphere and the actual metal object found in Colombia. 'If an artist is doing this, why is that? Well, I think it's partly the same reason. It's because we're learning that we don't understand what's in our skies or our waters. And there's something going on that's essentially bigger than us,' Mossbridge explained. The so-called ' UFO ' was spotted in March over the town of Buga, zig-zagging through the sky in a way that defies the movement of conventional aircraft. That same object was allegedly recovered shortly after it landed and has since been analyzed by scientists, who discovered it features three layers of metal-like material and 18 microspheres surrounding a central nucleus they are calling 'a chip.' Dr Jose Luis Velazquez, a radiologist who examined the sphere, reported finding 'no welds or joints,' which would typically provide a clue that humans made it. 'It is of artificial origin, in that it shows no evidence of welding, and its internal structure is composed of high-density elements. More testing is needed to establish its origin,' Velazquez and his team contended. The sphere also displays symbols that the team compared to ancient scripts, including runes, Ogham and Mesopotamian writing systems. Using AI to assist in deciphering the design, the team interpreted the message to read: 'The origin of birth through union and energy in the cycle of transformation, meeting point of unity, expansion, and consciousness — individual consciousness.' 'We interpret it as a message to humanity, encouraging a collective shift in consciousness to help Mother Earth—especially considering the current issues with pollution and environmental decline,' the researchers said. David Velez el Potro, one of the individuals who recovered the object, recently spoke on Maussan Television hosted by journalist and ufologist Jaime Maussan, whose research has stirred controversy for nearly a decade. Maussan gained attention in 2017 when he claimed to have discovered alien mummies in Peru—findings that remain unconfirmed. Velez el Potro has claimed that the sphere is authentic, found in the woods of Buga. He told Maussan that the man who found it, Jose, felt sick for days after touching the object. 'When I poured water on it, it started to smoke and the water vaporized instantly,' Velez el Potro added, suggesting the interior was hot and exterior cold. There have been no official reports or scientific analysis to confirm claims of a sphere falling over Buga. Only eyewitness reports. Velez el Potro said the government contacted him to hand it over the sphere, but he refused, saying, 'It would never be seen again.' Mossbridge noted that Velez el Potro's alleged discovery is the latest incident where people outside of the government are trying to find out what's going on with UAPs before someone comes in and shuts down the investigation. Non-governmental, non-partisan research groups like the Galileo Project and the Scientific Coalition for UAP studies have all been working to prove the existence of alien life in recent years. 'They are all trying to get rigorous information themselves, not necessarily waiting on the federal government, about what's going on in our skies, what's going on in our waters,' she said. Velez el Potro gave it to Maussan and his team of experts with hopes of them uncovering the sphere's origin. Researchers found that the sphere had irregular edges, 'indicating that it is a solid object.' The findings suggest that the outer layer could be made of titanium or steel, but researchers noted that a full composition analysis is needed to confirm this. X-rays did not reveal any visible signs of how the mysterious object was assembled.
Forbes
23-05-2025
- General
- Forbes
3 Ways ‘Game Theory' Could Benefit You At Work, By A Psychologist
I recently had a revealing conversation with a friend — a game developer — who admitted, almost sheepishly, that while he was fluent in the mechanics of game theory, he rarely applied it outside of code. That got me thinking. For most people, game theory lives in two corners of life: economics classrooms and video games. It's a phrase that evokes images of Cold War negotiations or player-versus-player showdowns. And to their credit, that's grounded. At its core, game theory studies how people make decisions when outcomes hinge not just on their choices, but on others' choices too. Originally a mathematical model developed to analyze strategic interactions, it's now applied to everything from dating apps to corporate strategy. But in real life, nobody is perfectly rational. We don't just calculate; we feel, too. That's where the brain kicks in. According to the 'Expected Value of Control' framework from cognitive neuroscience, we calibrate our effort by asking two questions: When both answers are high, motivation spikes. When either drops, we disengage. Research shows this pattern in real time — the brain works harder when success feels attainable. This mirrors game theory's central question: not just what the outcomes are, but whether it's worth trying at all. Using a game theory lens in a professional setting, then, can be messy and sometimes bring unwanted emotional repercussions. The saving grace, however, is that it's somewhat intuitively patterned and, arguably, predictable. So should you actually apply game theory to your professional life? Yes, but not as gospel, and not all the time. Being too focused on identifying, labeling and trying to 'win' every interaction can backfire. It can make you seem cold and calculating, even when you're not, and it can open the door to misunderstandings or quiet resentment. Put simply, it's important to be aware of how your choices affect others and how theirs affect yours, but it's also dangerously easy for that awareness to tip over into an unproductive state of hyperawareness. Game theory is a legitimately powerful lens — but like any lens, it should be used sparingly and with the right intentions. Pick your battles, and if you're curious how to apply it in your own career, start with clarity, empathy and a telescope and compass. Use these not to dominate the game, but to understand it and play it to the best of your abilities, so everyone wins. There's a popular saying in hustle culture: work smarter, not harder. At first glance, it makes sense — but in elite professional environments, it's a rather reductive and presumptuous approach. The phrase can carry the implication that others aren't working smart or that they aren't capable of working smart. But in high-performing teams, where stakes are real and decisions have impact, most people are smart. Most are optimizers. And that means 'working smart' will only take you so far before everyone's doing the same. After that, the only edge left is consistent, high-quality production — what we generalize as hard work. From a game theory lens, this type of hard work essentially increases your odds. Overdelivering, consistently and visibly, skews the probability curve in your favor. You either become impossible to ignore, or highly valuable. Ideally, aim for both. And here's where the real move comes in: assume the same of others. In most multiplayer games, especially online ones, expecting competence from your opponents forces you to play better. It raises the floor of your expectations, improves collaboration and protects you from the trap of underestimating the consequences of your actions. Take chess, for example. In a large study of tournament players, researchers found that serious solo study was the strongest predictor of performance, even more than formal coaching or tournament experience. Grandmasters, on average, had put in nearly 5,000 hours of deliberate study in their first decade of serious play. This is about five times more than intermediate players. This is why in a game of chess between one grandmaster and another, neither player underestimates the other. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder My friend told me he rarely applies game theory outside of code. But the more he talked about his work, the more obvious it became that the man lives it. He's been into video games since he was a child, and now, as an adult, he gets paid to build what he used to dream about. Sure, he has deadlines, targets and a minimum number of hours to log every week — but to him, those are just constraints on paper. What actually drives him is the intuitive thrill of creation. Everything else is background noise that requires calibration, not deference. This is where game theory can intersect with psychology in an actionable way. If you can identify aspects of your work that you uniquely enjoy — and that others may see as tedious, difficult or draining — you may have found an edge. Because in competitive environments, advantage is often about doing the same amount with less psychological cost. In game theory terms, you're exploiting an asymmetric payoff structure, where your internal reward is higher than that of your peers for the same action. When others see effort, you feel flow. That makes you highly resilient and harder to outlast. It's also how you avoid falling into the trap of accepting a Nash equilibrium. This is a state where each person settles on a strategy that feels rational given everyone else's, even if the group as a whole is stuck in mediocrity. No one deviates, because no one has an incentive to, unless someone changes the underlying payoff structure. For example, imagine a team project where everyone quietly agrees to put in just enough effort to get by, no more, no less. It feels fair, and no one wants to overextend. But if even one person realizes they could stand to gain by going above that baseline, they have an incentive to break the agreement. The moment they do, the equilibrium collapses, because now others are pressured to step up or risk falling behind. In a true equilibrium, each person's strategy is the best possible response to what everyone else is doing. No one gains by changing course. However, when your internal motivation shifts the reward equation, you may begin to question the basis of the equilibrium itself. Be aware, in any case, that this is a tricky situation to navigate, especially if we contextualize this from the point of view of the stereotypical kid in class who reminds their teacher about homework. Even if the child acts in earnest, they may unintentionally invite isolation both from their peers and, sometimes, from the teachers themselves. This is why the advice to 'follow your passion' often misfires. Unless there's a clear definition of what constitutes passion, the advice lands as too vague. A more precise version is this: find and hone a valuable skill that energizes you, but might drain most others. There's a certain kind of professional who doesn't chase money for money's sake. Maybe he writes code for a game studio as a day job, writes blogs on the side and even mentors high school kids on their computer science projects. But this isn't so much about padding his lifestyle or building a mountain of cash. What he's really doing is looking for games: intellectually engaging challenges, satisfying loops and rewarding feedback. In a sense, he's always gaming, not because he's avoiding work, but because he's designed his life around what feels like play. This mindset flips the usual money narrative on its head. And ironically, that's often what leads to sustainable financial success: finding personal fulfillment that makes consistent effort easier for you and everyone around you. In game theory, this is a self-reinforcing loop: the more the game rewards you internally, the less you need external motivation to keep showing up. So instead of asking, 'What's the highest-paying path?' — ask, 'Which games would I play even if I didn't have to?' Then, work backward to find ways to monetize them. This does two incredibly valuable things in tandem: It respects the system you're in, and it respects the goals you personally hold dear. While game theory maps workplace social behavior reasonably well, constantly remaining in a heightened state of awareness can backfire. Take the Self-Awareness Outcomes Questionnaire to better understand if yours is a blessing or a curse.
CTV News
21-05-2025
- Health
- CTV News
‘Baby brain' is real. 3 things to know about what's happening to your brain
Pregnancy is one of the three Ps (puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause), a time when a person's brain undergoes physical changes due to hormones. d3sign//File via CNN Newsource Science has pretty well established that the brain isn't static; it changes and adapts throughout our lives in response to life events in a process called neuroplasticity. Researchers are discovering this is especially true of female brains, which get remodeled significantly during the three Ps: puberty (as do the brains of adolescent males), pregnancy and perimenopause. All three transitions are a frequent butt of pop-culture jokes: the sulky, risk-taking teenager who only wants to be with friends; the scattered mom-to-be who leaves her cell phone in the fridge and can't remember where she parked the car; and the hormonal middle-aged woman who can't focus and spontaneously combusts with hot flashes. But far from being laughable, these behavioral stereotypes are the external manifestations of big internal shifts, many of them linked to the effects of fluctuating hormones on the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist Laura Pritschet, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by how female hormones, including estrogen and progesterone, affect the brain's organization and functioning. 'The reason I chose that field is because I was a budding neuroscientist as an undergrad, interested in brain networks and obsessing over how intricate everything was in the brain to simply allow us to have a personality or remember things,' Pritschet told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta recently, on his podcast Chasing Life. 'At the same time in my personal life, I was surrounded by menopausal women who were talking about their cognitive complaints and their attention issues,' she said. 'I thought we've got to connect these two together and understand this more.' Pritschet even volunteered as a 'guinea pig' during graduate school, having her brain scanned and blood drawn for 30 days, across two complete reproductive cycles (both on and off birth control pills), to begin to answer the question of how the day-to-day fluctuations in hormones relate to the day-to-day changes in the brain. Around this time, other researchers were studying what happens in the brain during pregnancy, Pritschet said, looking at the brain before and after gestation. They found many changes, but because the studies took a snapshot approach, many questions were left unanswered. 'If there's a 3 to 5% decrease in total gray matter volume, when is that occurring (during pregnancy), and how is it occurring?' Pritschet asked. 'We're missing huge gaps in what we call this metamorphosis. 'We know that the 40-week gestational window leads to these body adaptations to support the development of the fetus: We have increased plasma volume, immune function change, metabolic rate, oxygen consumption,' she said. 'What does this trajectory look like over gestation?' To find out, Pritschet and her team tracked the brain changes in one woman, using MRI and blood draws, from pre-conception and fertility treatment throughout her pregnancy to two years postpartum. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in September. 'We saw this reduction in gray matter volume pretty much across the whole brain,' Pritschet explained. 'We saw increased white matter microstructure and ventricle size.' (Quick anatomy lesson: The brain is made up of gray and white matter. Gray matter is where most of the brain's thinking and processing takes place. White matter helps connect the different brain areas, allowing them to communicate with one another.) 'The inflection point was birth,' Pritschet said. 'We saw that those reductions persisted into postpartum, with slight recovery, meaning that certain areas of the brain showed this rise in gray matter volume in early postpartum. Others did not.' Pritschet said this 'choreographed dance between major features of our brain' is in one respect a physical adaptation to the increased blood flow and swelling that comes with pregnancy. Additionally, the changes may also be a preparation for the next stage: parenting. 'It's a fine-tuning of circuits,' she explained. 'We know that pregnancy is the lead-up to this time in your life where there's a lot of behavioral adaptation that has to occur, and new cognitive demands, and a new cognitive load. 'And so the idea here is that there is this pruning or this delicate rewiring to make certain networks or to make communication in the brain more efficient to meet the demands that are going to have to occur,' Pritschet said. This theory is supported by earlier work. 'The first pinnacle papers that came out looking at neuroanatomy in human women from preconception to postpartum found that degree of change in gray matter volume — that sort of reduction — correlated with various … maternal behaviors (such as bonding). Again, that's all correlation,' she said. 'That's an area we need to do a lot more research on, and it needs a lot of context,' she said. 'But you can expect that if there's fine-tuning in these circuits that underlie cognitive or behavioral process, that the more fine-tuning it undergoes, the better performance you're going to have. That's the idea — but it's so much more complicated than that.' What happens to the brain during pregnancy? Pritschet offers these three insights. The only constant is change The body is the outward sign of a lot of inner upheaval. 'Pregnancy is a transformative time in a person's life where the body undergoes rapid physiological adaptations to prepare for motherhood,' Pritschet said via email. 'But pregnancy doesn't just transform the body — it also triggers profound change to the brain and reflects another critical period of brain development.' She called this remodeling an often-overlooked period of brain development that takes place well into a woman's adulthood. How alarmed should women be? Less gray matter may not sound very positive, but it happens for a reason. 'Despite what one might think, these reductions are not a bad thing, and in fact, are to be expected,' Pritschet said, noting that some of the losses are eventually regained. 'This change could indicate a 'fine-tuning' of brain circuits, not unlike what happens to all young adults as they transition through puberty and their brain becomes more specialized.' These changes could also be a response to the high physiological demands of pregnancy itself, she said, 'showcasing just how adaptive the brain can be.' These changes could affect future health and behavior Mapping these changes could open the door to understanding an array of other neurological and behavioral outcomes including postpartum depression, headaches, migraines, epilepsy, stroke and parental behavior. 'The neuroanatomical changes that unfold during (pregnancy) have broad implications for understanding vulnerability to mental health disorders … and individual differences in parental behavior,' said Pritschet. It may even provide critical insight into how the brain changes over a lifespan, she said.
