TL;DR: A 2026 study in Consciousness and Cognition found that waking mind wandering and nighttime dreaming had nearly the same density of bizarre elements, even though dreams were more likely to be rated as bizarre whole reports. Key Findings 379 experience reports: Researchers analyzed daily audio descriptions of one dream and one waking mind-wandering episode …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Epigenetics found that DNA methylation clocks, which estimate biological aging from chemical marks on DNA, gave substantially older age estimates in saliva than in two blood-derived samples from 91 early-to-mid-adult participants. Key Findings The sample included 91 adults: Researchers analyzed participants from a twin and sibling study with a mean …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in National Science Open argued that Centaur, an AI model promoted as a simulator of human cognition, could reproduce psychology-test answers while failing a simple instruction-understanding check. Key Findings Centaur was tested as a cognition simulator: the earlier model reportedly performed well across 160 psychology tasks, including decision-making and executive-control experiments. …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in Environmental Science & Technology found that male guppies exposed for 11 days to environmentally relevant amitriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant detected in waterways, made more spatial-learning errors in a maze while females were largely unaffected. Key Findings 170-fish learning test: Researchers tested wild-caught male and female guppies across 12 maze trials …
TL;DR: A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis posted as a medRxiv preprint found that mindfulness-based programs were linked to a small improvement in executive function, meaning inhibition, working memory, and flexible thinking, across 13 youth trials. Key Findings 13 trials were included: The meta-analysis pooled randomized and quasi-randomized trials in 1,560 children and adolescents aged …
TL;DR: A 2026 sham-controlled study in BMC Psychiatry found that one 15-minute session of 1.5 mA anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex did not improve visuospatial or verbal working memory in clinically stable schizophrenia patients. Key Findings 27 schizophrenia patients: The final analysis included 14 men and 13 women …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that older adults with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA)-defined mild cognitive impairment had less coordinated pulse-wave responses during a cognitive challenge than cognitively intact older adults. Key Findings Community cognitive-aging sample: The southern Taiwan dataset included 101 older adults: 12 reference participants, 50 people in a MoCA-defined mild cognitive impairment …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in PLOS One found that people with Parkinson’s disease made more silent pauses while reading aloud, especially when sentences were longer or syntactically more complex. Key Findings Reading task compared 71 adults: Researchers compared 32 people with Parkinson’s disease and 39 older control participants. Parkinson’s readers paused more often: The Parkinson’s …
TL;DR: A 2026 preprint in medRxiv used electroencephalography (EEG), a scalp electrical-activity recording method, and electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings to test whether brain-heart interplay, meaning coupling between brain-network organization and cardiac autonomic activity, tracks aging, Parkinson’s disease, cognitive screening scores, and freezing of gait. Key Findings Three datasets: Researchers analyzed resting EEG-ECG data from healthy young …
TL;DR: A 2026 mouse study in Cell found that olfactory receptor neurons, the smell-sensing cells in the nose, were arranged in spatial bands that lined up with matching sensory maps in the brain’s olfactory bulb. Key Findings Organized receptor bands: Researchers found that odor receptor neurons were not randomly scattered across the mouse nose; receptor …
