brain

positive thoughts can “hack” your brain and improve your immunity

by

For decades, science has looked askance at the famous placebo effect with medications. We know it exists, we know it worksbut he as exact has always had gray areas that have prevented us from exploiting it to the fullest. Its presence is such that in scientific studies it must be kept in mind in order to be able to avoid your bias. Discovering it. Now, a recently published study in Nature Medicine has just shed light on this mechanism, and the conclusion is fascinating: training your brain to have positive expectations can physically boost the immune response. Something that can cause a drug or vaccine to work with great effectiveness thanks to having ‘positive thinking’. And a team of researchers led by Nitzan Lubianiker has shown that there is a direct biological connection between the brain’s reward system and the body’s ability to generate antibodies after a vaccine. A training. The experiment, which sounds like something out of a white science fiction novel, recruited 85 healthy participants. The objective was not to give them drugs, but to subject them to neurofeedback sessions using functional magnetic resonance imaging. That is, activating a part of your brain to generate an organic response. Specifically, the goal is to activate the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA)a key deep brain region in the reward circuit and motivation. The same one that ‘turns on’ when we eat something very delicious or receive a ‘like’ on the last published reel. In this way, during four sessions the participants learned to increase the activity of this area by evoking pleasant memories or positive mental strategies. They were literally flooded with Mr. Wonderful quotes. A vaccine. After doing this training with the brain to activate the reward zone, the participants received a vaccine against hepatitis B. The researchers’ objective was to see if having previously received good motivation with positive thoughts had an influence on the effectiveness of the vaccine. The result. A week after receiving the vaccine, blood tests revealed a key fact: those subjects who achieved greater activation of the VTA showed higher levels of antibodies. That is, they had developed a greater body response against the virus. Something that would offer better resistance in the event of being exposed to the hepatitis B virus. A missing link. What this study puts on the table is solid evidence for psychoneuroimmunology. It’s not magic, it’s biology: the brain’s reward circuits seem to have a “direct line” with the immune system that until now we had not had controlled. Ignacio J. Molina Pineda, professor of Immunology at the University of Granada, highlights the importance of the discoveryor by pointing out that it demonstrates how positive expectations modulate immune potency. It is the other side of the coin nocebo effectsomething we already saw during the COVID-19 vaccine trialswhere fear of side effects caused real symptoms in patients who had only received saline water. But there is fine print. Although in this study there was a correlation between brain activation and the presence of more antibodies, there were no large differences in the average total antibody concentrations between the trained and control groups. It must be taken into account that the antibodies were only measured a week later, meaning that we do not know if this ‘super protection’ lasts months or years. Something that also adds to a very small sample of 85 people that could require replicating the study on a large scale. Future applications. This is undoubtedly the most important thing we can think of with these results. And if it ends up being confirmed, we could be facing the birth of complementary therapies where, before an immunological treatment or an important vaccination, the patient goes through a brief mental training to maximize the effectiveness of the drug. Images | Robina Weermeijer Tim Mossholder In Xataka | Adolescents up to 32 years old: neuroscience explains why the brain takes much longer than we thought to mature

science already knows what happens to your brain

by

after one night intense partya phrase that can become common is “yesterday I drank so much that I have blackouts.” For years, popular culture has treated these episodes as the fact that alcohol is a kind of eraser of memories in our brain, but the reality is very different: It’s not that memories are erased, it’s that they never existed.. The notice. Our parents didn’t say it anymore: drinking a lot of alcohol and smoking controversial substances is something that can fry the brain. And they were partly right. different experts point out in connection with research and meta-analysis on alcohol consumption and brain health, which shed light on what exactly happens in our heads when we go too far. A blackout. What we usually call a ‘gap’, memory loss the morning after a drunken night, is technically anterograde amnesia, or blackout. During a blackout a person can continue talking, walking (not always straight) and even having apparently normal conversations, but your brain has stopped transferring information from short-term memory to long-term memory. The person responsible for all this It is in the hippocampus itselfa region of the brain that acts as the logistics center for our memories. They arrive here to be stored in long-term memory, which is what interests us to remember what we did the next morning. A chemical interference. When the blood alcohol concentration begins to rise rapidly, quite significant chemical interference occurs. In this case modulates NMDA and GABA receptors which alters the communication between neurons and interrupts the ‘Long-term empowerment‘ (LTP). The latter is the physical process by which neural connections are strengthened to consolidate a memory. In short: during a heavy drunk, the hippocampus is still on to store memories, but the ‘save button’ is completely switched off. Therefore, the next day no matter how hard we try: there is nothing to recover because nothing was recorded in the hippocampus. They fry the brain. If we recover the idea that our grandmothers and parents transmitted to us about the effect of alcohol on the brain, the reality is that neuroimaging studies show As in chronic users there is significant hippocampal atrophy. This does not mean that memories become like water, but rather that the volume of brain matter is decreased. As brain tissue shrinks due to neuronal and connectivity loss, the empty space is occupied by cerebrospinal fluid. And this can give us the myth that the memory turns into water or black spots appear on the imaging tests when they pass. The effect on young people. In this population it has traditionally been said that they can handle alcohol much better and with several drinks they continue to be in top shape. But scientifically a great paradox occurs: the adolescent and young brain is extremely plastic, which makes it much more vulnerable to external aggressions. This is why binge drinking in developing brains not only causes blackouts more easily, but can also generate persistent changes in brain structure. Science has shown in this case that even moderate consumption (more than 14 units per week) is linked to greater hippocampal atrophy and worse long-term cognitive performance. He doesn’t forget who he is. Excessive alcohol does not cause us to suddenly forget our names, something that would fall squarely into the realm of serious dementia. But what is clear is that the blackouts repeated are an obvious risk marker. Not only because of silent structural damage, but because of behavioral vulnerability: a person who is not creating memories is a person who has lost the ability to learn from the consequences of their actions in real time, drastically increasing the risk of accidents and dangerous decisions. Images | Nate Holland Alyona Yankovska In Xataka | Forgetting things is not a bug, it is a feature of your brain: how not remembering things makes us think better

If you haven’t trained it before, your brain will ignore any attempt to relax.

by

A very typical (and frustrating) situation can certainly be in the middle of a heated discussionwith pulses racing and jaw very tight. And right at this moment someone blurts out the most irritating advice in the world: “come on, take a deep breath and calm down“. you trybut not only does it not work, but it seems to make you angrier. A reality. It’s not that you are a lost case of emotional management. It is that, according to experts and recent scientific studiesbreathing like technique Immediate help in a “rush” of anger is often a lost battle if prior work has not been done. The ‘high’ problem. Sonia Díaz Rois, coach specialized in anger management, is blunt about it: Trying to breathe to calm yourself in the midst of an emotional peak does not work because the body, in a state of maximum alert, does not recognize slow breathing as a safety signal. And it makes a lot of sense, because when anger flares, we go into ‘fight or flight’ mode. The sympathetic nervous system take command, cortisol triggers and the brain prioritizes survival over reflection. Literally all the machinery is active to deal with the ‘threat’ that has been detected. A sudden change. If at this moment of extreme peak of the organism we want to stop it suddenly with slow breathing without having previously trained, the brain can interpret this abrupt change even as an additional threat or an obstruction. In this way, the only thing that is generated is a feeling of lack of air that will increase the stress you are experiencing. That is why the solution to anger is not to turn it off, but to listen to it. But for breathing to be a useful tool, you must first train it in the calmest moments. This is what is known as creating an ‘anchor’. There are different breaths. Science has an opinion in favor of the need to train this relaxation method when you are not angry. But it has also begun to distinguish which techniques are most effective in these high-stress situations. To this end, a 2023 randomized controlled study compared various techniques of breathwork with the mindfulness medication traditional. The result was finding a very effective technique to improve mood above meditation. It is known as Cyclic Sighing (cyclical sigh in Spanish). The way to do it is very simple, since you only have to do a deep inhalation followed by a short inhalation and a very long exhalation. In this way, those who practiced it for just 5 minutes a day showed greater long-term emotional resilience. Because. Neuroscience explains that by prolonging exhalation (as in the 4-7-8 technique, where you exhale twice as long as you inhale), we directly activate the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for “slowing down” the body. Scream or breathe. For years, popular culture defended the theory of catharsis with very typical phrases such as “let it all out”, “hit a cushion” or “scream loudly and say everything you think.” However, it does not seem the most appropriate as indicated. a study published in 2024 about activities to manage anger that has totally denied it. And his reasoning is quite logical. A high-arousal activity such as boxing or literally shouting tends to increase arousal more than it should, and is something that maintains or increases the aggressiveness that you are trying to control. In contrast, low-arousal activities like deep breathing or yoga are the only ones that significantly reduce anger. Even in contexts of acute stress, as seen in studies with COVID-19 patients in 2024guided deep breathing exercises dramatically reduced anxiety and stress, although interestingly they did not have the same effect on depression. Train when you are well. The conclusion of researchers and experts like Díaz Rois is quite clear: breathing is not a panic button that can be pressed for the first time in a fire, but rather it is something that must be trained to be in full shape when necessary. To do this, you must enter when you are well, practicing the sigh technique that we mentioned before or counting your breaths. In this way, the nervous system is being trained to relate the respiratory pattern we are doing with the message that we are safe. Other important points. In addition to all this, science is quite clear that slow breathing practiced just before a negative emotional stimulus reduces its impact. This is something that we can keep in mind when, for example, we are going to enter an exam or a place where we think we are going to be very uncomfortable, where taking a few breaths beforehand can save us a bad drink. What you have to say. With all this that we have discussed, the next time someone tells you to “breathe” while you are angry, remember that they are scientifically right, but that for this trick to work you have to go through a series of training. Images | engin akyurt In Xataka | Resolving one of the most intriguing debates in philosophy: whether or not “altruism” exists among animals

It’s a warning signal from your brain.

by

in a world where insomnia is the order of the dayhearing people saying the phrase ‘it’s like putting your head on the pillow and going cold’ can make you very envious. An attitude that in some cases is seen as a great skilland that certainly seems like an evolutionary advantage. However, science has a much darker reading: it is not efficiency, it’s debt. The thermometer of fatigue. In sleep medicine, the time between getting ready to sleep (such as turning off the light in the bedroom) and entering the first phase of sleep is called Sleep Onset Latency (SUN). A time that has been measured to establish how long is normal for a person, and science estimates it between 10 and 15 minutes. That is to say, between turning off the light and lying down until we start to sleep, the normal thing for an adult is that about 10 minutes pass. When we are below. If there is a range, being above or below it can trigger alarms, such as when the value in a blood test is not within the normal ranges. If it is below, the brain enters a state of “homeostatic hyperexcitability” according to research done for the Sleep Foundation. By this they mean that when the system is so desperate to recover, it ends collapsing when given the chance. And that is why we have three different stages depending on how long it takes us to sleep: The normal range is between 10 and 18 minutes. We speak of pathological drowsiness when it lasts less than 8 minutes. We refer to severe sleep deprivation when we spend less than five minutes. The brain shuts down very quickly. The idea, replicated by experts and based on principles of chronobiology, suggests that instant sleep is the response to chronic restriction. In this way, if for weeks or months you sleep less than necessary, the body accumulates a “bill” that tries to charge himself in every microbreak. Science has wanted to delve into this aspect, and that is why different studies that have been published in Nature and PMC link this ultra-short latency not only with fatigue, but with metabolic alterations and a decrease in cognitive performance. That is why the idea that falling asleep quickly is synonymous with better rest is completely wrong. In fact, research shows that people with this “short latency” often suffer from involuntary lapses of attention and accumulated fatigue which, in environments such as driving or precision work, can be fatal. A long process. The sleep debt is not erased with a night of ‘bingeing’ in bed and getting up at 3 in the afternoon, but studies suggest that this latency can persist during the day. It all depends on what sleep deprivation we have faced our body with. But logically you also have to be careful with this false belief of having rested a lot because the onset of sleep is very rapid. The quality of sleep is only measured by its phases, but in no case does the variable of how quickly I enter the sleep phase come into play. What needs to be done. In the case of a person who falls exhausted at the first yawn, the first thing is to check sleep hygiene. But also be attentive to other indicators such as a possible sleep apneasince this value of sleeping quickly or in any situation is an indication of the presence of this disease that can be really serious and difficult to diagnose. The important thing is that one of the initial symptoms What must be checked in these cases is this poor rest. Images | Shane In Xataka | We thought insomnia was just not being able to sleep. Now we know that there are five different disorders

Scientists have investigated what happens to your brain when you play video games. And they have surprising news

by

There is something strangely comforting about dissonance. Sometimes, while I’m fighting with a crochet hook trying to make a scarf not end up looking like a dish towel, I like to put the TV channel in the background. TacticalGramma. Michelle is 59 years old, she is a proud grandmother and, while I clumsily count wool stitches, she is annihilating entire squads in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 with a precision that any teenager would want for themselves. The scene has that visual irony: technology has not come to isolate us in a basement, but to rescue our neurons from rust. For decades, the social narrative sold us that video games “rot” the brain; Today, science is beginning to suggest that, if you want to reach 60 with good mental agility, perhaps you should take control. The brain clock. A study published by Nature has managed to compare the health of neural connections with the person’s actual age—what is known as brain clocks. The team led by Carlos Coronel-Oliveros has discovered that players who are experts in strategy titles like StarCraft II They have a mental structure that is much more resistant to the passage of time. On average, the brains of these players function with the agility of someone four years younger, according to a statistical estimate based on neuroimaging models. An efficiency phenomenon that neuroscience calls Brain Age Gap (BAG). When Sudoku is no longer enough. While classic brain games are isolated and repetitive tasks, an action video game forces the brain to manage an avalanche of information in real time. This level of constant demand—planning movements, reacting to attacks, and filtering out distractions simultaneously—forces neurons to reorganize. To reach this conclusion, the research team used research techniques whole-brain modelingcombining fMRI with machine learning algorithms capable of detecting subtle patterns in connectivity. The results showed more efficient integration in the so-called “frontoparietal hubs”, key regions for attention and executive function that are usually among the first to deteriorate with age. Changes in brain hardware. This apparent rejuvenation has a physical reflection in the structure of the brain. Science has found that, just as a muscle develops with exercise, certain key areas of players become denser and more robust. Studies in Scientific Reports and Translational Psychiatry reveal that those who regularly play action titles have more “gray matter” in regions responsible for coordination, attention and making quick decisions. It is as if the brain had expanded its information highways to react sooner and better to each stimulus. But the most useful change is the refinement of our visual “filter.” Research in PLOS ONE show that the players They develop a superior ability to ignore unnecessary noise. It’s not that they see more, it’s that their brain has learned to process only the information that really matters to win the game, optimizing the energy expenditure of the visual cortex. The ‘learning to learn’ factor. What is truly significant is not being more precise within the game, but the impact on the ability to continue learning. A study in Communications Biology showed that video game training Action speeds up the speed at which people learn new tasks, even when they are unrelated to the game. As they explain psychologists Daphne Bavelier and C. Shawn Green, these games train the brain’s attentional control. The result is improved cognitive adaptation, valuable in an ever-changing technological world. But experts still debate the degree of “far transfer”—that is, the extent to which being a keyboard whiz makes you better at managing a real crisis or a complex spreadsheet. When the benefit runs out. Even so, it is advisable to lower your enthusiasm. Most of these studies they are correlational: they do not allow us to state with certainty whether playing transforms the brain or whether certain already “agile” brain profiles are more inclined to enjoy video games. Furthermore, the effects vary depending on age and life context. Side B is not minor either. Researchers warn that excessive exposure can cause cognitive fatigue and sleep disturbances. The World Health Organization recognizes the video game disorder as a real problem when gambling becomes a compulsive behavior. The neural benefit depends on the balance that if the challenge stops being stimulating and becomes automatic or addictive, the protective effect disappears. Not just any game will do. Another key point is that not all video games produce the same effects. The strongest benefits are seen in action and real-time strategy games, which require quick decisions and multitasking. As experts point outonce a game stops being difficult and becomes mechanical, brain plasticity stagnates. Speed ​​and time pressure seem to be essential ingredients for keeping machinery in shape. There is something hopeful about seeing someone like TacticalGramma master a digital environment. The science doesn’t say that video games are a panacea, but it does suggest that brain aging doesn’t have to be a one-way path to decline. Perhaps the secret to a healthier brain is not in a pill, but in our ability to continue to face what is difficult and accept the frustration of constant learning. For now, I’m going to leave crocheting for a while. Image | freepik Xataka | The art of self-deception: why our brain defends our mistakes even if it knows we are wrong

Neuroscience explains why the brain takes much longer to mature than we thought

by

The idea we have about adolescence right now it ends at 25 years old, this being the age at which supposedly the brain has just been ‘cooked’ forever to give way to a functional adult. But the reality is very different as the new studies point out, since we would continue to mature the brain until at least 32 years old. Where did the current idea come from? To understand why scientists pointed to 25 years as the age at which brain maturity ends, we must go back to studies of the past. Specifically to Resonance studies from the 90s and early 2000s like the classic Nitin Gogtay who mapped brain development and discovered that the cortex matures from “back to front.” This means that the sensory and motor areas are consolidated soon, but the prefrontal cortex which is in charge of executive functions, impulse control and planning is last in line. The problem is that many of those studies stopped following the subjects when you reach 20 or 21 years oldsince seeing that the curve continued to rise, it was assumed that the “peak” of maturity would arrive shortly after, around the mid-20s. But we had no idea what happened after this. Just assumptions. A new frontier. In order to solve this ‘blindness’ of neuroscience used the analysis of more than 4,000 brains using connectivity neuroimaging techniques at the University of Cambridge. What they saw was clearly five ‘epochs’ or milestones in brain wiring throughout life. Different turning points. And as if our life were a game, in the brain we have like five different screens that begin at a specific age that acts as a turning point. These ages are: 9, 32, 66 and 83 years. What interests us in this case is the period between 9 and 32 years, since the brain is characterized by a continuous increase in the efficiency and integration of neural networks. It is what the authors describe as an ‘extended adolescence’. It’s not that at 30 you think the same as a 15-year-old, but that the architecture of connections has not yet reached its final ‘adult’ form. Something that occurs at age 32 and remains stable until age 66, when brain activity begins to decline. To understand it better. Researchers wanted to use a simile to illustrate this new paradigm. To do this, they ask us to think of our brain as the union of several “functional neighborhoods” that specialize in specific tasks such as vision, language or logic. All of these are integrated with each other through different highways that are high-speed connections. Well then, between 20 and 32 years old The brain is balancing these two processes, so that the connections between different areas of the brain are well connected and organized. And it is precisely this typical pattern of the adult network, where the brain is capable of integrating complex information fluidly, which does not appear until after the age of thirty. Teenager at 30? This is where the important nuance comes in. Just because the brain continues to mature structurally does not mean that we should redefine adolescence in legal or clinical terms. All this because maturation is a gradient, not a switch of ‘now I’m a teenager and now I’m not’. To understand this, you have to know that the different elements of the brain and executive functions have a very different development curve. In this way, saying that the brain matures at 32 is a simplification that is as useful (or as erroneous) as saying that it matures at 25. What science really tells us is that there is no sudden development “blackout”; We remain biologically plastic and dynamic much longer than we thought. An opportunity for habits. This prolonged maturation is good news for all of us, since if the brain continues to actively ‘wire’ itself throughout our 20s, it means that structural plasticity is especially dynamic at this stage. In this way, science is quite clear: aerobic exercise, learning new languages ​​or facing cognitively demanding tasks during this “third decade” of life helps to improve the volume and organization of the brain’s white matter. On the contrary, factors such as chronic stress can affect the integrity of those connections. In short, a brain at 28 years old is not a finished product, but rather a work in progress that is finishing paving its best highways. The next time someone tells you that you should have your life figured out now because “you’re an adult,” you can tell them that, according to the University of Cambridge, your brain still has a couple of years of baking left. Images | Hal Gatewood Robina Weermeijer In Xataka | From 27 to 36 years old the brain reaches its peak concentration. And from there, bad news

Pebble wants us to carry an “external memory” for the brain on our finger

by

There are everyday moments when a fleeting idea crosses our mind and we know that if we don’t save it instantly, it will probably disappear without a trace. It can happen while we are cycling, cooking or simply walking with our hands busy, when taking out the cell phone is inconvenient or outright impossible. That feeling of losing something that seemed important has led some companies to explore an unexpected solution: turning the index finger into a place to capture quick thoughts before they escape. The fear of forgetting what is important. For Pebble, the challenge is not just in coming up with an idea out of the moment, but in how often it happens. Its founder states that it happens to him between five and ten times a day, and that the most frustrating thing is not the idea itself, but the subsequent certainty of having forgotten something without being able to recover it. That recurring sensation is what, according to the company, justifies finding a more direct mechanism to record brief thoughts before their context is lost. A notepad ring. The device proposed by Pebble, the Index 01takes the form of a compact ring, built in stainless steel and equipped with a physical button and a microphone. By pressing it, the user can capture a short voice note immediately. It is available in various colors and sizes, and has water resistance to withstand continued use. Its main function is to offer a quick entry point to save information without depending on the phone at the exact moment it arises. From finger to app: Each recording begins with a press of the button, which activates the ring microphone and saves the audio to its internal memory, without any additional processing. When the phone is nearby, the recording is transferred via Bluetooth and that’s where all the work happens: the Pebble app converts voice to text using a recognition model that works locally, and then an LLM that also runs on the phone itself determines whether to create a note, set a reminder or add an event to the calendar. It never plugs in, but it runs out: Pebble opts for a silver oxide battery similar to what hearing aids use, allowing the ring to run for years without needing to be recharged. According to the company, an average use of between ten and twenty daily recordings of a few seconds is equivalent to about twelve or fifteen hours of accumulated audio, enough to achieve that long autonomy. When the stack nears the end, the app notifies the user, who can purchase another ring and send the previous one for recycling. The approach means that the battery cannot be replaced or recharged, something Pebble openly acknowledges. When the end-of-life notice arrives, the user must purchase a new ring. As we say, the company offers the possibility of sending the old device for recycling, but does not mention discounts, replacement programs or return compensation, so the replacement apparently works as a separate purchase. Pebble insists that the ring is designed to process information locally and limit its scope to what is strictly necessary. The connection between the device and the mobile is encrypted, and both the speech-to-text conversion and the classification using a language model occur on the phone itself and, by default, do not require sending the data to external servers, although the company offers an optional cloud backup system for recordings that is still in development and plans to offer encryption. The ring does not listen continuously or record health data, and it does not integrate a speaker or vibration. Its operation is limited to the moment in which the user keeps the button pressed. When memory lets itself be hacked. Beyond recording notes, Pebble allows you to configure the ring to perform additional actions with single or double presses, from controlling music to taking a photo or activating home automation routines. The app supports sending reminders to services like Notion and offers support for over 99 languages. The company also describes an action system based on MCP, small extensions that run on the mobile itself and that, according to its roadmap, should expand what the device can do without depending on a central server. From watch to ring: Pebble is going through a relaunch phase in which it seeks to expand its catalog beyond smartwatches. After recovering your brand and sending your new Pebble 2 Duoprepares the arrival of Pebble 2 Time with a significant level of prior demand. In that scenario Index 01 appears. The founder himself summarizes its bet stating that the ring has ceased to be a technological device and has become “an extension of the brain”, a phrase that reflects the ambition with which the company presents this project. Price and availability of Index 01. The company puts the starting price at $75 during pre-sale, with a rise to $99 when the first units begin shipping globally starting in March 2026. The device is in the design validation phase and is produced in the same plant that works with Pebble Time 2, where the current prototypes are assembled. Shipments will depart from Asia under a DDP system, so taxes and duties will be handled prior to delivery. Images | Pebble In Xataka | We have tested the new Google glasses with Gemini: AI and today’s technology drive the dream that Glass promised

The man who failed to transform Siri and the brain of the AI ​​strategy ends his stage

by

Apple has communicated that John Giannandrea, one of the most influential executives in its AI strategy in recent years, will begin a retirement process that will culminate in 2026. The company explains that the executive will leave his position as senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, although he will continue to collaborate as an advisor in the coming months. This announcement comes months after a realignment of responsibilities related to Apple Intelligence and Siri. Giannandrea landed at Apple in 2018 as one of its most notable signings, with the task of strengthening the AI ​​strategy and giving Siri a new direction. His team was in charge of areas such as Apple Foundation Models, the internal search engine and machine learning research, technical pieces on which Apple has built much of its recent strategy. He also took on responsibility for guiding the evolution of Siri and coordinating AI projects that affected multiple teams in the company. A project that began with ambition and ended in postponements. Apple Intelligence was born as a profound renewal of the user experience, but the advances were not at the expected pace. The Information detailed that the demo shown at WWDC 2024 did not fully reflect the advanced capabilities that Apple had suggested, and that many of those features were not implemented at the time of the presentation. The pressure increased when the company confirmed that the new Siri with personalized functions would be delayed until 2026. What was supposed to be the new turning point ended up becoming a chain of postponements. Internal war in Cupertino over the direction of AI. Tensions between the AI/ML group and the software team were long-standing, according to The Information. While the area led by Giannandrea opted for a more cautious advance focused on privacy, Craig Federighi defended a more pragmatic approach aimed at tangible results. The clash of priorities became evident when some engineers began referring to the AI/ML team as “AIMLess,” a sign of the accumulated unrest. The situation led to a March 2025 twist that placed Federighi and Mike Rockwell at the forefront of Siri’s new direction. A loss of influence that had been brewing. According to Bloomberg, Tim Cook’s trust in Giannandrea suffered after the numerous delays in the development of the Apple Intelligence functions promised during WWDC 2024. In a meeting with his team, the manager admitted that the delays were “ugly” and acknowledged the shame and anger that this situation had generated among the staff. After the change in leadership in 2025, a good part of his functions began to be left in the hands of other managers, while he maintained other tasks in research into AI and robotics technologies. This shift in operational focus serves as a backdrop to the announcement that he will become an advisor before retiring in 2026. The landing of Amar Subramanya and the new architecture of power. Apple has hired Amar Subramanya as vice president of AI after his time as corporate vice president of AI at Microsoft and 16 years at Google, where he was responsible for engineering the Gemini assistant. According to the official note, Subramanya will take charge of key areas such as Apple Foundation Models, machine learning research and AI Safety and Evaluation teams. He will report directly to Craig Federighi, thus reinforcing his weight in the artificial intelligence strategy. The rest of the organization linked to this area will be under the supervision of Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue, a cast that seeks to align responsibilities with their respective departments. Giannandrea’s retirement and the arrival of new managers mark a turning point for Apple in its artificial intelligence strategy. The company now relies on a more defined structure, with Craig Federighi at the center of the project and Amar Subramanya leading key research areas and foundational models. The challenge will be to convert this reorganization into visible improvements for users and regain competitiveness in a market that evolves at high speed. Images | Apple In Xataka | Huawei has a patent with which to manufacture 2nm chips. The only problem is that it’s just a patent.

We are discovering how the brain “hacks” us to make us hungry. And it is a key step in the race towards losing weight.

by

Right now, treatments to lose weight are the order of the day, with a clear protagonist like Ozempic. The problem is that beyond the aesthetic effects that are achieved, there are many doubts about both the side effects as well as all the effects it has on the body. But little by little science you understand much better how they achieve their effectwhich seems like a real miracle for many. What we knew. In general, these treatments They are ‘copies’ of GLP-1 which is a hormone that we produce normally in our body and makes us have the feeling of satiety. The moment we increase it exogenously we have a greater feeling of satiety that allows patients to lose weight (although with a risk of bouncing when treatment is stopped). But beyond this effect, the action it could have directly on the brain was something that had only been explored in animals. Now, a new study published in Nature has crossed this frontier thanks to Casey Halpern’s team, which has taken advantage of a “unique opportunity” to observe, for the first time in humans, the impact of Mounjaro (tirzepatide) directly into the reward center of the brain. Why it is important. The discovery of how the brain can ‘hack’ our body to eat much less opens many doors for us in the field of pharmacology to be able to continue working on definitive treatment. against obesitybecause we are seeing that it is something in high demand by many people who find it necessary to have this help (although it is not a miracle) to be able to reduce their weight. And we even see how in the United States purchasing is becoming more and more accessible. And we say that it is a miracle, because Ozempic or Mounjaro does part of the work, but we must not leave aside the change in eating habits to adjust the diet and be able to maintain it after stopping the treatment. The problem is that there are people who after stopping the treatment continue eating normally, and logically they see that there was no miracle involved. How it was done. The study focused on a 60-year-old woman with treatment-resistant obesity and type 2 diabetes. This patient was already taking Mounjaro for diabetes, and coincidentally, she was participating in another trial to treat dysregulated eating. This coincidence allowed the researchers to do something unprecedented: use the electrodes, already implanted in its nucleus accumbens (NAc)for hear brain activity while the drug took effect. And this brain nucleus is really important as it is the center of pleasure in humans and reward, that is, it is the point that can be modulated to restrict food consumption. The sign of craving. Those cravings we have for eating a little chocolate, a greasy pizza or a hamburger are something we all have because it is what gives us pleasure. In this case it was seen that the signal changed over the months, specifically the delta-theta frequency band. In the first months of treatments with Mounjaro, the patient had no desire for food in that sense of craving. Something that corresponded to a null signal in this nucleus, so it could be said that the medication was silencing this ‘noise’ that is generated in the pleasure center. The problem is that in the fifth to seventh months, despite being on the maximum dose of medication, the patient again had severe concern about food. And here again the signal in the nucleus had spiked to match that of those people who had no treatment. An advantage for the future. The most important finding here is that the change in the brain preceded the behavior. That is, before having a relapse this signal was increasing as if it were a warning signal. That is, a future where a sensor can detect this brain signature and alert the patient or doctor that the effectiveness of the drug is decreasing, before that the person will feel the cravings again in an uncontrolled way. Much ahead. This is a study with a single person, and it has many limitations and its conclusions logically cannot condition the clinical activity of the use of these medications. What it is useful for (and a lot) is to understand that the brain has a lot to do with this weight loss as if it were a real button to control eating habits. Perhaps silencing this brain nucleus in a very specific and sustained way may be the ‘holy grail’ that weight loss science seeks to control these cravings that can ruin a diet imposed by specialists. Although there is still a lot to investigate and it is only a first door for other medications that can complement Ozempic or Mounjaro, which has given great results. Images | Shawn Day Victoria Shes In Xataka | This is the great hope of the competition to replace Ozempic. Your weapon: banish needles with a pill

That a teenager begins to ‘hate’ his parents is something that is in his brain, and science has already found the pattern

by

If you’re a parent of a teenager, you know: their world revolves around their friends. If you were one of them, you surely remember: parents’ opinion took a backseat. And although it seems that it is a sign of the rebellion that we see normal at this age, the reality is that the guilt is literally found in the brain. The culprit. But when asked what causes this indolence among adolescents? The answer comes from the magnetic resonance imaging that has been applied to the brains of some adolescents. And research shows that, during adolescence, the brain not only changes its interest, but also reconfigures your reward circuits so that the voices of strangers are more gratifying than the voice of one’s own mother. And this is something that explains the fact that adolescents give much more importance to a friend than to their own closest family, and even go so far as to prioritize them above anything else. Although in the end he has a good excuse in his brain systems. The study. To find this out, the researchers didn’t have the teens listen to scolding. They used a more cunning methodology by gathering 46 children and adolescents between 7 and 16 years old who were exposed to listening to recordings of nonsense words such as teebudie-shawlt. The important thing about this investigation was that these meaningless words were spoken by two voices: that of their own mother and that of two women unknown to them. In this way, when the recording was played, the activity of their brains began to be analyzed through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see the parts of the brain that were lighting up with each of the voices that were playing. The results. In the youngest children between seven and twelve years old, their mother’s voice caused a party at the reward centers of the brain, specifically in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). The interesting thing here is that this activity was much greater than what was felt when hearing the voices of the strangers and it is logical because the mother is the center of her social universe that causes her greater happiness. But things change completely in adolescents between 13 and 16 years old, where these same reward and social evaluation regions showed significantly greater activity for unfamiliar voices than for their own mother’s. In this way, the age that we can consider as a border between them paying attention to their mother and when they are going to completely ignore what they are told will be around 13.5 years. Because. In this case we are not talking about adolescents rejecting their parents, since in a behavioral test they were able to identify mothers’ voices in an almost perfect way. The change is precisely in the valuation of that voice. This neurobiological turn is considered an adaptive process essential for maturity. The teenage brain is being “refreshed” for a new mission: leaving the nest. To prepare for independence, the brain must begin to find new social connections more rewarding. You have to tune in with your companions, future allies and partners. The bibliography. This finding fits with previous models that were made to identify the differentiated stages in social and brain development, where the affective focus passes from the mother to friends and finally to romantic relationships. Recent reviews reaffirm that the reward system in adolescence is especially sensitive to novel social stimuli, and that the maturation of frontostriatal connections modulates these changes. A previous work by the same group had already shown that in childhood the maternal voice has a privileged response in the mesolimbic circuit and the current study extends and completes that model by showing how this pattern is reversed in adolescence. In this way, every time we see a teenager who literally tells his mother that he doesn’t even want to hear her, but spends all day talking to his friends, we already know why: his brain has changed so that he likes it more. Images | Sebastien Mouilleau Amir Hosseini In Xataka | If the question is where to find the time to play sports or learn languages, you have the answer on your mobile

Log In

Forgot password?

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.