Bonobo Imagination - Newborn Rhythm - Cerebellum & Language - Keto Claims

[Breedlove, S]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/science/bonobos-apes-imagination.html

At a ‘Tea Party’ With Scientists, This Ape Showed Some Imagination

By Alexa Robles-Gil

Having an imaginary friend, playing house or daydreaming about the future were long considered uniquely human abilities. Now, scientists have conducted the first study indicating that apes have the ability to play pretend as well.

The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that imagination is within the cognitive potential of an ape and can possibly be traced back to our common evolutionary ancestors.

“This is one of those things that we assume is distinct about our species,” said Christopher Krupenye, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study.

“This kind of finding really shows us that there’s much more richness to these animals’ minds than people give them credit for,” he said.

Researchers knew that apes were capable of certain kinds of imagination. If an ape watches someone hide food in a cup, it can imagine that the food is there despite not seeing it. Because that perception is the reality — the food is actually there — it requires the ape to sustain only one view of the world, the one that it knows to be true.

“This kind of work goes beyond it,” Dr. Krupenye said. “Because it suggests that they can, at the same time, consider multiple views of the world and really distinguish what’s real from what’s imaginary.”

Bonobos, an endangered species found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are difficult to study in the wild. For this research, Dr. Krupenye and Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews, relied on an organization known as the Ape Initiative to study Kanzi, a male bonobo famous for demonstrating some understanding of spoken English. (Kanzi was an enculturated ape born in captivity; he died last year at age 44.)

    © 2026 The New York Times Company


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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/babies-beat-neuroscience-sense-rhythm

Babies brains’ can follow a beat as soon as they’re born

By Nora Bradford

For more than a century, psychologists thought that the infant experience was, as the psychologist and philosopher William James famously put it, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” But new research suggests babies are born with a surprisingly sophisticated neurological toolkit that can organize the visual world into categories and pick out the beat in a song.

In the first of two new studies, neuroscientists managed a rare feat: performing functional MRI (fMRI) scans on more than 100 awake 2-month-old infants to see how their brains categorize visual objects. fMRI requires near-stillness, which makes scanning babies notoriously difficult. While the infants lay in the machines, images of animals, food, household objects and other familiar items appeared above their heads like “an IMAX for babies,” says Cliona O’Doherty, a developmental neuroscientist at Stanford University who conducted the work at Trinity College Dublin.

“MRI is difficult even under ‘ideal’ circumstances when research participants can follow instructions to hold still,” says Scott Johnson, a developmental psychologist at UCLA who was not involved in the study. “Babies can’t take instruction, so these researchers must have the patience of saints.”

The imaging showed that a brain region called the ventral visual cortex, responsible for recognizing what we see, already responded similarly to that of adults, O’Doherty and colleagues report February 2 in Nature Neuroscience. In both adults and 2-month olds, the ventral visual cortex’s activity is distinct for different categories of objects, pushing back against the traditional view that the brain gradually learns to distinguish between categories throughout development.

© Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026
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https://www.thetransmitter.org/language/cerebellum-responds-to-language-like-cortical-areas/

Cerebellum responds to language like cortical areas

By Natalia Mesa

A region of the cerebellum shows language specificity akin to that of cortical language regions, indicating that it might be part of the broader language network, according to a new brain-imaging study. 

“This is the first time we see an area outside of the core left-hemisphere language areas that behaves so similarly to those core areas,” says study investigator Ev Fedorenko, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Initially thought to coordinate only movement, the cerebellum also contributes to cognitive processes, such as social reward, abstract reasoning and working memory, according to studies from the past decade. But despite the fact that people with cerebellar lesions have subtle language struggles, the region’s contributions to that skill have been ignored until recently, Fedorenko says. With this new work, “I think it becomes harder to dismiss language responses as somehow artifactual.”

Fedorenko and her team analyzed nearly 1,700 whole-brain functional MRI experiments conducted over the course of 15 years. They originally collected and analyzed those scans to identify language-selective regions of the neocortex, but they reanalyzed many of them to determine the cerebellum’s role in linguistic processing.

Four cerebellar regions activated robustly when participants performed language-related tasks, such as reading passages of text or listening to someone else reading the passages aloud, in line with previous work. But only one region responded exclusively to these language-related tasks; it did not activate during a variety of nonlinguistic tasks—including movement, arithmetic tasks and a spatial working memory task—or when participants listened to music or watched videos of faces and bodies. The findings were published last month in Neuron. 

© 2026 Simons Foundation

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https://nautil.us/can-the-keto-diet-treat-mental-health-conditions-1266132/

Can the Keto Diet Treat Mental Health Conditions?
 
    By Molly Glick

Not long after upending federal diet guidelines in order to prioritize “real food” on our plates, United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has offered a new piece of questionable advice. During a tour to promote these dietary recommendations, Kennedy recently claimed that a keto diet can cure schizophrenia—an assertion that experts have quickly thrown cold water on.

The ketogenic diet promotes fat-rich meals and low amounts of carbohydrates. While keto eating has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years—it ranked the most Googled diet in the U.S. in 2020—it was initially designed in the early 20th century for patients with epilepsy. More recent studies have confirmed that the diet is effective for certain types of epilepsy because it can control seizures. 

Meanwhile, we have much less evidence for its impacts on symptoms of schizophrenia. So far, small studies have offered some early evidence that ketogenic diets may help people with the condition. 

“There is currently no credible evidence that ketogenic diets cure schizophrenia,” Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, told The New York Times.

Kennedy also proclaimed that the diet can essentially cure bipolar disorder, according to studies he recently read. But as with schizophrenia, keto’s impacts on bipolar disorder have only been examined in limited numbers of patients so far.

Preliminary findings have also hinted that a keto diet could ease symptoms of depression. It may offer “small antidepressant benefits” for people who don’t respond to medication, according to a recently published JAMA Psychiatry paper. But this work is in the early stages as well and remains far from conclusive.

© 2026 NautilusNext Inc.
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