Octopus Intelligence - Spina Bifida - Social Learning - Antidepressant Weaning

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May 2, 2026, 6:53:04 AM (5 days ago) May 2

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01302-4

Do octopus brains work like humans’ — or is there another way to be smart?

Liam Drew

Three hearts; blue blood; no skeleton; arms like tongues. These are just some of the alien features of octopuses, squid and cuttlefish — members of the cephalopod family. The outlandish list continues. Cephalopod skin can taste chemicals, sense light and change colour and texture rapidly. In many species, the sucker-covered arms can even regenerate.

These invertebrates have evolved independently from the vertebrate lineage for more than 600 million years. Their last common ancestor was probably a worm-like creature with a rudimentary nervous system and eye-like patches of light-sensitive cells. Despite this evolutionary gulf, vertebrates and these highly specialized molluscs share strange similarities. Their eyes, for example. “It’s eerie how similar they ended up,” says Cristopher Niell, a neuroscientist at the University of Oregon in Eugene. “The convergent evolution of the eye still blows my mind.”

Now, one similarity is spurring a boom in cephalopod neuroscience. Around 400 million years ago, cuttlefish, squid and octopuses diverged from the only other living cephalopods — the nautiluses. They then lost their protective shells and evolved brains that are uniquely large among invertebrates. These brains bestow the soft-bodied cephalopods with high intelligence. Cuttlefish, squid and octopuses have excellent memories, use tools and are adept problem-solvers; they have a concept of time and are capable of delayed gratification.

Cephalopods are the only non-vertebrate animals that have big, smart brains, says Cliff Ragsdale, a comparative neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. And that presents a unique opportunity. Neuroscientists have gained a wealth of knowledge about how vertebrate brains work, but are increasingly looking to cephalopods for insights into ways to build large, high-functioning nervous systems.

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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/prenatal-surgery-spina-bifida-stem-cell

Prenatal surgery for spina bifida may get a boost from stem cells

By Meghan Rosen

For the first time, doctors have used stem cells to try and repair the spinal cords of human fetuses in the womb.

The new technique attempts to heal nerve damage caused by spina bifida, a disabling birth defect. In this condition, the bony tissue of a fetus’s spine doesn’t knit together properly around the spinal cord. That can cause a kaleidoscope of medical issues, including lifelong paralysis and bladder and bowel problems.

Traditional fetal surgery to patch up the spine can limit the scope of these problems — but it does not repair nerve damage that has already occurred. Adding living stem cells to the procedure might.

At least, that’s the goal of fetal surgeon Diana Farmer’s team. So far, the approach appears to be safe, the researchers reported earlier this year in theLancet. In six fetal patients with severe spina bifida, applying a stem cell–loaded patch to their exposed spinal cords did not cause infection, tumor growth or interfere with healing. That’s important because “no one knew what stem cells would do inside a fetus,” says Farmer, of the University of California, Davis.

For now, the vital question — whether the technique mends fetal spinal cords — remains unanswered. That’s because researchers are still performing follow-up assessments of the patients, who are now toddlers. At this stage, it’s too early to say how well the surgery worked, and Farmer is careful not to speculate. “If we could get every kid to not be in a wheelchair,” she says, “that would be fantastic.” But the team won’t know for a few years. Until then, Farmer says, she doesn’t want to give people false hope.

In some ways, this study represents “a seismic shift” in the field, says Ramen Chmait, director of Los Angeles Fetal Surgery at the University of Southern California, who was not involved with the work. If the technique pans out, he says, it “could be a huge, important step in modern-day medicine.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/science/whats-safe-to-eat-birds-of-a-feather-learn-together.html

What’s Safe to Eat? Birds of a Feather Learn Together

By Kate Golembiewski

By watching their peers, dolphins learn to capture fish in empty conch shells, then ferry the shells up to the water’s surface in order to eat. Octopuses can master experimental tasks by watching their tankmates in the laboratory. Crows follow the cues of others in their flock to attack specific humans who have harassed fellow crows in the past.

Scientists call it “social learning,” and it essentially means monkey see, monkey do, an adage that turns out to apply to many animals beyond just primates. Now, a study of Australia’s sulfur-crested cockatoos shows that the birds employ social learning to understand whether unfamiliar foods are safe to eat.

In more forested areas of the cockatoos’ native range in Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia, these mohawked parrots eat plant roots, seeds, fruits and insect larvae. But the birds have learned to thrive in urban environments. “They’re everywhere in Sydney,” said Julia Penndorf, a behavioral ecologist and lead author of the study in PLOS Biology, who encountered the birds as a postdoctoral researcher at the Australian National University in Canberra.

In urban areas, the birds have expanded their diets to include nonnative plants and nuts, including almonds and sunflower seeds people offer to them, and they can be seen prying the lids off garbage bins in order to forage.

“The big issue with urban birds is, they kind of eat everything,” Dr. Penndorf, who now works at the University of Exeter, said. This expanded diet is high-risk, high-reward: the birds have more options for food, but there’s always a chance that strange new snacks might be poisonous.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/01/science/psychiatry-kennedy-ssris-maha-antidepressants.html

Top Psychiatrists Call for a Greater Focus on Ceasing Medication

By Ellen Barry

As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sets out to rein in the use of psychiatric medications, a group of prominent psychiatrists are developing guidance for helping patients to stop taking them, noting that providers sometimes “park” patients on medications that are no longer necessary or effective.

The experts, whose first recommendations appeared in JAMA Network Open and the British Journal of Psychiatry, identify structural problems that may lead to overprescribing: There are few clinical trials showing when it is advisable to stop a medication; many providers do not regularly review whether a prescription is still needed; and psychiatry residents receive more training in starting drug prescriptions than stopping them.

“We have not really taught our trainees to think about, what is the logical endpoint?” said Dr. Joseph F. Goldberg, a past president of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology, which convened a group of 45 psychiatrists to agree on basic principles for “deprescribing,” as supervised drug tapering is sometimes called.

“You’ll see a patient in consultation who has been parked on a medication which seems to be ineffective for years, and you’ll ask, ‘Why are you still on this medicine?’” he said. “We’ve got a bugaboo going about passive re-prescribing, and I hope we’ll see much less of that.”

The new recommendations come amid rising pressure from Mr. Kennedy and his allies in the Make America Healthy Again movement, who have long made the case that Americans overuse psychiatric medications.

The Department of Health and Human Services will convene expert panels on deprescribing the main class of medication used to treat depression — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s — this summer, with an eye toward developing official guidance.
© 2026 The New York Times Company

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https://www.science.org/content/article/tiny-probes-make-sense-abnormal-bursts-epileptic-brain

Tiny probes make sense of abnormal bursts in the epileptic brain

By Jennie Erin Smith

Seizures are the most dramatic symptom of epilepsy, but they’re not the only type of abnormal brain activity in people with the condition. Brief electrical bursts called interictal epileptiform discharges, or interictal spikes, can occur hundreds or thousands of times a day, usually without a person noticing. Though not as dangerous as seizures, they can cause temporary confusion and contribute to long-term cognitive problems even in those whose seizures are controlled.

A new study of highly detailed recordings from human brains reveals these spikes occur in a choreographed sequence of events that is consistent and predictable. The research, published today in Nature Neuroscience, also shows spikes recruit some of the same neurons involved in speech perception, pulling them briefly off their jobs.

The new findings are “impactful,” says Jennifer Gelinas, a neurologist and epilepsy researcher at the University of California (UC), Irvine who was not involved with the study. The work, she says, opens the door to a new generation of brain stimulation technologies that might anticipate and abort spikes before they can cause harm.

Named for the distinct peaks they form on electroencephalography readings, spikes were once dismissed by clinicians as benign. But they’re increasingly recognized as far from it. In 2023, a team led by neurologist Jonathan Kleen of UC San Francisco (UCSF) reported that people with temporal lobe epilepsy could not remember or repeat back a word spoken to them during a spike: They went blank. “Imagine this happening when you’re in class, or giving a presentation,” Kleen says. One 2025 study went so far as to conclude that spikes occurring during sleep are the major culprit in long-term memory issues among people with temporal lobe epilepsy.

Implantable brain stimulation devices used to suppress seizures can detect spikes and react to them, but they can’t predict them. And this type of treatment, known as closed-loop responsive neurostimulation, can take years to calm epileptic activity. Some antiseizure drugs can also reduce spikes, but treating them “is not as easy as it sounds,” says epileptologist Dániel Fabó of the University of Szeged, who was not involved in the study. Antiepilepsy drugs are tested for their effect on seizures, not spikes, he notes, and using too much of them can affect cognitive function.
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https://nautil.us/how-does-your-brain-know-a-cat-is-a-cat-1280394

How Does Your Brain Know a Cat Is a Cat?

By Kristen French

What is a cat, and how do we know when we’ve encountered one?

This question may be harder to answer than it seems. Neuroscientists Lisa Feldman Barrett and Earl Miller say people typically think about categories such as cat and apple backward—bottom-up instead of top-down.

In reality, you don’t hear a meow, and see whiskers and paws and then conclude, “Cat!” Before any of this happens, your brain has sent signals about a “cat hypothesis”—and a plan for how to respond to a cat—to your body, based on past experience, Barrett and Miller say. This cat hypothesis, in turn, actively orchestrates what signals your body processes and how. In other words, the brain constructs classifications on the fly, and we’re not even conscious this is happening until after the fact.

Barrett, a renowned Harvard neuroscientist and psychologist who has written for Nautilus and is best known for her theory of constructed emotion, teamed up with Miller to review “converging” evidence from a wide range of disciplines: neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, brain imaging, and cognitive science. The pair published their results recently in Nature Reviews: Neuroscience.

Their new theory of categories has a lot in common with Barrett’s theory of how emotions work. She argues that emotions aren’t hardwired universal reactions, but are instead predictions constructed rapidly and in the moment from internal bodily sensations, past experiences, and cultural context. While her work on emotions has been highly influential, it remains an active subject of debate in the field of psychology.

I spoke with Barrett and Miller about what they call “folk psychology,” and how their theory of categorization relates to so-called beginner’s mind, human bias, and objectivity and mental illness. We also talked about Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s modes of thinking fast and slow.