In the space of just a few seconds, a person walking down a city block might check their phone, yawn, worry about making rent, and adjust their path to avoid a puddle. The smell from a food cart could suddenly conjure a memory from childhood, or they could notice a rat eating a slice of pizza and store the image as a new memory.
For most people, shifting through behaviors quickly and seamlessly is a mundane part of everyday life.
For neuroscientists, it’s one of the brain’s most remarkable capabilities. That’s because different activities require the brain to use different combinations of its many regions and billions of neurons. How it manages to do this so rapidly has been an open question for decades.
The Study
In a paper published March 8 in Nature Human Behaviour, a team of researchers, led by Joshua Jacobs, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering,…
