Scientific+American+Mind+20190304

PLUS WITH COVERAGE FROM MARCH /APRIL 2019 | SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM/MINDMAGAZINE What is it? A stream of unconscious thought, syn ...

It may be one of the greatest scientific mysteries yet to be solved: What is consciousness? It’s an explana- tory gap that still ...

March/ April 201 9 WHAT’S Volume^30 • No.^2 INSIDE FEATURES 11. There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought Philosopher Peter Ca ...

GETTY IMAGES How Dad’s Stresses Get Passed Along to Offspring Mouse studies show tiny intercellu- lar pods convey to sperm a leg ...

diagnose neurodegenerative diseas- es—in addition to altering sperm to disrupt the brain health of resulting offspring. Striking ...

months after a student reports stress, his sperm shows changes in “small noncoding RNAs”—RNA molecules that do not get translate ...

says he was able to tell if someone’s mood was getting worse just by looking at whether this network was active or not. Psychiat ...

Bad First Impressions Are Not Set in Stone People are more willing to change their mind about people they initially deem “nasty” ...

Alzheimer’s Attack on the Brain May Vary with Race A new study finds African-Ameri- cans with dementia have less buildup of cert ...

teristics. But once researchers have developed a more practical way to measure levels of key proteins involved in the disease, s ...

GETTY IMAGES Special Report There Is No Such Thing as Conscious Thought Philosopher Peter Carruthers insists that conscious thou ...

Peter Carruthers, Distinguished University Professor of Phi- losophy at the University of Maryland, College Park, is an expert o ...

the sensory-based contents present in working memory. In your view, is consciousness dif- ferent from awareness? That’s a diffic ...

ries to fill in for lost ones. Moreover, if introspection were fundamentally dif- ferent from reading the minds of oth- ers, one ...

Special Report The Br a i n’s Autopilot Mechanism Steers Consciousness Freud’s notion of a dark, libidinous unconscious is obsol ...

Special Report I n 1909 five men converged on clark University in massachUsetts to conquer the New World with an idea. At the he ...

Special Report adjusts our limb motions accordingly. Conscious pro- cessing would become engaged, however, if the ball took a su ...

Special Report along multiple tracks. Compared with a computer, our gray matter chugs along very slowly—but on many par- allel l ...

Special Report to keep consciousness to a minimum. As he explains, “You know the Talking Heads song where ‘heaven is a place whe ...

Special Report This hypothesis can be empirically confirmed. Chil- dren who as a result of developmental disorders were born wit ...