Science

Our brains actively construct a model of the world, which is our actual experience. Incoming sensory data serves mainly to verify and correct this internal model. A familiar example is predictive texting on smartphones. You start typing, and the phone anticipates the rest of the word. This process mirrors how our brains handle sensory input, triggering various internal models.

When you examine how these myriad factors intertwine, from genetics and evolution to the proteins synthesized mere minutes ago, you see a continuous arc. In my view, there's no room in this intricate web for free will.

Neuroscientist & primatologist known for stress research and public engagement

Engineering life is often less demanding than creating a nuclear weapon, making monitoring more challenging. This complexity underscores the need for the scientific community to actively engage in establishing robust safeguards and developing strategies to prevent bioterrorism.

Dean of Stanford School of Medicine & cardiovascular researcher

Dreaming introduces noise into our system. There's a compelling hypothesis in machine learning called 'overfitting,' where systems become so tuned to recognizing patterns that they falter when faced with new, unexpected scenarios. Some computer scientists are exploring ways to inject noise into computational models to keep them adaptable.

When discussing consciousness with my three sons, I describe it as an emergent phenomenon. Imagine 80,000 people in a stadium, each one representing a neuron. The collective roar you hear when you approach the stadium might be likened to consciousness.

The experiences you have in dreams, measured by brain activity and glucose consumption, are remarkably similar to those you would have while awake. Whether you're running the London Marathon in reality or dreaming about it, your brain's electrical and metabolic patterns are nearly identical.

This leads me to a bold assertion—though it's my opinion, not a scientific measurement—that we sleep because we must dream. Yes, sleep has metabolic benefits, but a crucial aspect seems to be that our neurons need to dream to maintain their capabilities.

I believe it's more fundamental: similar to the 'use it or lose it' principle that applies to muscles, our brains engage in a nightly routine that stimulates thoughts and ideas not typically relied upon during the day. This built-in process keeps our thinking adaptive and nimble, fostering divergent thoughts and offering an evolutionary advantage.

By measuring skulls from 400 years ago, you'll find that our ancestors had straight teeth, prognathic faces, and very wide jaws. Compare these to modern skulls, which show very slender, narrow faces and small jaws. It's all there, plainly evident, yet it seems as though nobody is really talking about this or acknowledging the rapid changes that have occurred over just a couple of hundred years.

Author of "Breath" & Investigative Journalist on Respiratory Science

People have been told that asthma is an incurable condition, that they'll need to stay indoors and rely on a bronchodilator every few hours for life. But that's just not true. The way you breathe is deeply connected to asthma symptoms, a message that asthmatics rarely hear from anyone.

Author of "Breath" & Investigative Journalist on Respiratory Science

We get more energy from air than from food or drink. So, if we're absorbing that energy inefficiently, it's bound to catch up to us. A useful analogy is food: you can survive on a diet of 12 cookies a day, getting enough calories, but it's not nourishing, nor does it allow your body to operate efficiently.

Author of "Breath" & Investigative Journalist on Respiratory Science

Habituation is a very basic mechanism. It's something we find in every neuron and every system of our brain, including our fundamental abilities like perception. Essentially, we stop responding to and perceiving things that are not changing or are changing very gradually.

Neuroscientist known for research on optimism bias and decision-making

I think this goes into the history of psychology; for example, 100 years ago, we couldn't even measure what an emotion is. It's something in your head and in your brain, and we were always used to measuring behaviour, not people's psychological experiences. So just from that alone, it became less important because it wasn't observable behaviour, as if what people are thinking and feeling doesn't matter—which is obviously crazy; it does matter.

Psychologist & Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence

My observation is if we make a parallel between biology and economics, the role of the economy is like the role of metabolism in an organism. Because what does the metabolism do? It takes in food, resources from the environment, and breaks them down and rearranges them to make other things that we need. Similarly, the economy takes in natural resources from the environment, combines them with labour to make goods and services that we use.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

A complex system is one where the properties of the building blocks, when they interact, can create phenomena that are very different from the building blocks themselves. The human brain is a great example. You take a neuron, which is a cell – you put an electrochemical signal in, electrochemical signal comes out – but somehow you hook 80 billion of them together and you get a brain. You have to hook them together just right, of course, but the result is completely fundamentally different than what you started with.

Complexity scientist & founding director of Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Economics program

As we continue to push the boundaries of what is computationally possible, we are not just developing a new technology, but fundamentally expanding our understanding of the universe and our place within it.

Theoretical computer scientist specializing in quantum computing and computational complexity