TL;DR: A 2026 study in eLife found that prior cocaine self-administration disrupted how rat orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a frontal brain region involved in task structure and flexible behavior, encoded hidden states in an odor-sequence task. Key Findings 3,881 single units: The study recorded 3,881 lateral OFC single units while rats performed a sequential odor task. …
TL;DR: A 2026 conceptual paper in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science argued that heavy reliance on AI-generated language can create “Protein Shake Brain,” a state where thoughts are fluent and available but not fully owned by the person using them. Key Findings Protein Shake Brain is a proposed cultural-psychological label for AI-assisted thinking that feels …
TL;DR: A 2026 study in The British Journal of Psychiatry found that psychiatrists described parental profession as shaping psychiatry career choice mainly through role modeling, family values, autonomy, guidance, and lived experience with mental health. Key Findings Qualitative sample: Researchers analyzed reflective questionnaire responses from 45 doctors working in child and adolescent psychiatry and 24 …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint found that adults with multiple sclerosis showed accelerated long-term forgetting (ALF), meaning unusually steep memory loss over days despite normal early recall, on two verbal memory tests. Key Findings The long-delay test was the key contrast: researchers compared 62 adults with multiple sclerosis and 65 matched controls using word-list and …
TL;DR: A 2026 medRxiv preprint enrolled 177 adults with migraine in a 30-day smartphone study and found that daily cognition and symptom check-ins were feasible, with 3,688 completed assessments and higher baseline burden in chronic migraine. Key Findings Migraine cohort: The MIND study followed 177 adults with migraine using once-daily smartphone surveys and brief mobile …
TL;DR: A 2026 preprint posted to medRxiv found that adults with migraine had worse brain fog, more task forgetting, and slower smartphone cognitive-test performance on headache days, suggesting that migraine-related cognitive symptoms can be measured in daily life rather than only in clinic visits. Key Findings Brain fog affected 60% of headache days: participants contributed …
TL;DR: A 2025 study in The Journal of General Psychology found that introductory psychology textbooks showed modest improvement from 2018 to 2023, but several classic myths and contested topics were still presented in biased or oversimplified ways. Key Findings Researchers rated coverage of 11 textbook topics that psychology professors had flagged as commonly distorted or …
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. …
