Revolutions are often thought of in terms of conflict and disorder, but they just as often come on waves of peaceful obsolescence. The old way of doing things is allowed to linger as long as it likes while everyone else gets on with the future. In the last few years the "free-to-play" model— where games are given away on mobile phones or online while the developer makes money through advertisements or the sale of in-game items—has encircled the videogame industry. At first it seemed like a curiosity, a unique idea that made sense in China and Korea, where loot-hoarding games like Ragnarok Online, The Legend of Mir, and World of Warcraft found a perfect match with internet bar culture. Meanwhile Activision and Electronic Arts competed for dominance in a luxury business energized by dreams of $180 Rock Band bundles and franchises with the "potential to be exploited every year across every platform." When rumors began circulating last month that Nexon, one of the biggest free-to-play comp

I have noticed that some readers continue to find my argument about the illusoriness of free will difficult to accept. Apart from religious believers who simply “know” that they have free will and that life would be meaningless without it, my most energetic critics seem to be fans of my friend Dan Dennett’s account of the subject, as laid out in his books Elbow Room and Freedom Evolves and in his public talks. As I mention in Free Will, I don’t happen to agree with Dan’s approach, but rather than argue with him at length in a very short book, I decided to simply present my own view. I am hopeful that Dan and I will have a public discussion about these matters at some point in the future.

In life-threatening conditions, microbes use game theory to account for neighbors’ decisions and work out their best tactics for survival. New research presented at the 243rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society on March 27 suggests that human cells may do the same.

Bacteria can chemically communicate with each other about factors like colony density and the activity of neighboring cells, allowing complex decision making to adapt to environmental situations.

“Bacteria in the colony communicate via chemical messages and how each bacterium performs a sophisticated decision process by using a specialized network of genes and proteins,” the researchers wrote in their abstract.

Traumatic, persistent memories are indeed a case of recall gone awry. But as a treatment, CISD misapprehends how memory works. It suggests that the way to get rid of a bad memory, or at a minimum denude it of its negative emotional connotations, is to talk it out. That’s where Mitchell went wrong. It wasn’t his fault, really; this mistaken notion has been around for thousands of years. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, people have imagined memories to be a stable form of information that persists reliably. The metaphors for this persistence have changed over time—Plato compared our recollections to impressions in a wax tablet, and the idea of a biological hard drive is popular today—but the basic model has not. Once a memory is formed, we assume that it will stay the same. This, in fact, is why we trust our recollections. They feel like indelible portraits of the past.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia? A biologist’s science- fiction hunch is gaining credence and shaping the emerging science of mind- controlling parasites.

Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.” He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

What if the best thing art has to offer is freedom from choice? There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate. Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. 

Like a disowned half-brother the Neanderthals keep hammering on our door, forcing us to face inconvenient truths.

In the nineteenth century, fossil remains of powerful, thickset, short-necked human-like creatures with massive skulls and protruding brow ridges were found in Europe and recognized as belonging to an extinct species very closely related to us.

It turns out these "Neanderthals" (named after the German valley where the first examples were excavated) left the human homeland in Africa about 300,000 years ago. They migrated north into Europe and had sole possession of our continent for 250,000 years until people like you and I first arrived here, also from Africa, less than 50,000 years ago.

The two species lived side by side, without conflict, for the next 20,000 years -- an amazing achievement -- until suddenly, around 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals in eastern Europe began to die out. Whatever was killing them spread like a deadly curse. Soon none were left across the whol

You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right back to the beginning of the universe. You may also believe that determinism is true. (You may also know, contrary to popular opinion, that current science gives us no more reason to think that determinism is false than that determinism is true.) In that case, standing on the steps of the store, it may cross your mind that in five minutes’ time you’ll be able to look back on the situation you’re in now and say truly, of what you will by then have done, “Well, it was determined that I should do that.” But even if you do fervently believe this, it doesn’t seem to be able to touch your sense that you’re absolutely morally responsible for what you next.

The case of the Oxfam box, which I have used before to illustrate this problem, is relatively dramatic, but choices of this type are common. They occur frequently

In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering the neural basis of decision-making. In one set of experiments, researchers attached sensors to the parts of monkeys’ brains responsible for visual pattern recognition. The monkeys were then taught to respond to a cue by choosing to look at one of two patterns. Computers reading the sensors were able to register the decision a fraction of a second before the monkeys’ eyes turned to the pattern. As the monkeys were not deliberating, but rather reacting to visual stimuli, researchers were able to plausibly claim that the computer could successfully predict the monkeys’ reaction. In other words, the computer was reading the monkeys’ minds and knew before they did what their decision would be. The implications are immediate. If researchers can in theory predict what human beings will de

The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated, and how should that possibility influence decisions on the animal’s future treatment? Orcas, like their close relatives, dolphins, certainly seem smart, though researchers debate just how intelligent these cetaceans are and how similar their cognition is to humans. Should we ever treat such creatures like people?

For centuries it seemed obvious to most people what separated them from other animals: Humans have language, they use tools, they plan for the future, and do any number of things that other animals don’t seem to do. But gradually the line between “animal” and “human” has blurred. Some animals do use tools; others solve complicated problems. Some can even be taught to communicate using sign language or other systems. Could it be that there isn’t a clear difference separating humans f