What Brains Do Without You You believe you think, decide, and act. Brain tissue with no consciousness, intention, values, beliefs, or self just did the same thing. The only difference? The voice in your head that narrates what happened, and more complex adaptive sensors and feedback loops.   Brain organoids learn complex tasks. Ash Robbins and colleagues at UC Santa Cruz grew mouse cortical organoids from embryonic stem cells. They wired the organoids to microelectrode arrays and embedded...

We are currently obsessed with the idea of "Critical Thinking." From primary school to corporate boardrooms, it is hailed as the ultimate antidote to misinformation. We are told that if we could just be more logical, more eloquent, and more rigorous in our analysis, our problems would vanish. But there is a flaw in this obsession. As a society, we have become experts at the mechanics of thinking while losing our grip on the substance of reality. We have produced a generation of sophisticated...