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A Familiar Feeling with an Unsettled Explanation

Tickling is instantly recognizable but scientifically slippery. It blends touch, laughter, anticipation, emotion and social context into a sensation that can feel playful in one moment and unbearable in another. In “The Surprising Science of Tickling,” neuroscientist Konstantina Kilteni argues that this odd experience offers a useful way to study how the brain combines bodily signals and predicts what a touch will feel like.

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Memory is fallible, but that does not mean it is easy to rewrite wholesale. People forget details, confuse sources and absorb misleading suggestions. The more alarming claim is that an experimenter or therapist can readily implant a vivid memory of an entire event that never occurred. Psychologists Bernice Andrews and Chris R. Brewin argue that the evidence for this stronger claim is much weaker than it is often made to seem.

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People move through a hidden landscape whenever they enter a classroom, workplace or group chat. They track who belongs together, who carries influence, which relationships have weakened and how information is likely to travel. Neuroscientist Oriel FeldmanHall argues that this is more than social intuition: the brain builds a cognitive map of relationships, borrowing some of the same machinery it uses to navigate physical space.

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Neandertals were once portrayed as dull evolutionary failures, separated from modern humans by a wide intellectual gulf. Archaeology has steadily erased that caricature. They made sophisticated tools, processed plants into food, treated illness, used symbols and cared for their dead. Then the first Neandertal genome delivered an even more intimate correction in 2010: Neandertals and Homo sapiens interbred, and their DNA still forms part of many living human genomes.

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Most adults can summon a first childhood memory, but it usually comes from no earlier than preschool. The blank stretch before that is known as infantile amnesia. It appears in college students and grandparents alike, which suggests that it is not simply the ordinary fading that affects all memories over time. The puzzle is stranger: babies plainly learn about people, objects and language, yet adults cannot consciously revisit events from their own infancy.

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Adolescence is often described as a neurological waiting room: emotions run hot, self-control is unfinished, and sound judgment will arrive only when the prefrontal cortex matures. Neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang argues for a more constructive view. Teenagers’ sensitivity and intensity are not merely problems to contain. They help power a new capacity to connect immediate experience with identity, ethics, history and imagined futures. When adolescents practice this kind of reflection, the article suggests, they may actively shape the developing brain.

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Schizophrenia is usually treated as a single disorder with a familiar set of symptoms and a standard biochemical explanation. Diana Kwon’s April 2025 Scientific American article argues that this picture is giving way to something more complicated and potentially more useful. Hallucinations, delusions and disordered thought may be the visible endpoints of several different biological processes. The future of treatment may therefore depend less on finding one universal cause than on identifying which form of illness each person has.

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Psychopathy is often treated as a fixed identity: a person either has a conscience or does not, and little can be done about it. Maia Szalavitz’s July/August 2025 Scientific American article argues that this fatalism is especially dangerous when applied to children. Young people with severe callous-unemotional traits can be hard to reach, but early, carefully tailored treatment can reduce aggression, strengthen relationships and prevent those traits from hardening into adult psychopathy.

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In Scientific American’s March 2025 article, John Kounios and Yvette Kounios examine the strange instant when a solution arrives whole: the aha! moment. Their central argument is that insight is neither mystical inspiration nor ordinary reasoning performed very quickly. It is a distinct mode of thought in which unconscious processing reorganizes a problem and suddenly delivers a new interpretation to awareness.

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Scientific American’s January 2025 article by Michelle Carr examines lucid dreaming as a rare state in which sleep, imagination and self-awareness overlap. The article’s central idea is that dreams are not sealed-off mental events. Under the right conditions, a sleeping person can recognize that a dream is happening, communicate with researchers, respond to instructions and sometimes steer the dream’s content.