Sources: cognition

Nicely written very personal engagement with several recent-ish works on the remarkable activities of and relationships between funghi and trees.

Article describing research done on mice that sees them consistently breaking trained patterns of behaviour in a way the researchers come to see as strategic. “Mice are surprisingly using higher-order approaches to learn even simple tasks” — as usual, the question is: why is this surprising? Why isn’t it the initial assumption to test in the hypotheses relating to animal cognition? Good read.

More stories from the edges of biology demonstrating something clearly like cognition in ‘primitive’ organisms, plants, even just cells; memory and decision making without brains or evolution. Excellent review of work and ideas across a range of fields and experiments.

Having heard many times that the right side of the brain connects to the left side of the body and vice versa, I had never really thought to ask why, and I had no idea it was ubuquitous throughout the brain-possessing animal population. This article provides an intuitive explanation, though for those of us with spatial dyslexia the illustrations can be a bit bewildering.

Excellent introduction to a trend in science away from computational/representational theories of mind — also away from Cartesian/Aristotelian, human/brain-centric assumptions — and toward more active, environmentally-embedded theories that, refreshingly, focus on things other than humans first, like plants.