James' World 2

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While you do the dishes or drive to work, your mind is likely not on the task at hand; perhaps you’re composing a grocery list or daydreaming about retiring in Italy. But research published in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests you might be taking in more than you think.

During a simple task that requires minimal attention, mind wandering may actually help people learn probabilistic patterns that let them perform the task better.

“The idea to study the potentially beneficial influence of mind wandering on information processing occurred to us during the COVID pandemic, when we had plenty of time to mind wander,” says Péter Simor, lead author of the recent study and a psychology researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest. Study participants practiced a simple task in which they pressed keyboard buttons corresponding to the direction of arrows that lit up on a screen. But there were patterns hidden within the task that the participants were unaware of, and they learned these patterns without consciously noticing them. The researchers found that when participants reported letting their minds wander, they adapted to the task’s hidden patterns significantly faster.

“This is an exciting and important piece of work, especially because the authors opted for a nondemanding task to check how [mind wandering] would affect performance and learning,” says Athena Demertzi, a cognitive and clinical neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. Previous related research focused more on long and demanding tasks, she says—on which zoning out is typically shown to have a negative effect.

But the results are not clear-cut, says Jonathan Smallwood, a psychology researcher at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. “I don’t think that this means the spontaneous mind-wandering episodes themselves cause implicit learning to occur,” he says. “Rather, both emerge at the same time when people go into a particular state.” Neither Smallwood nor Demertzi was involved in the new study.

Simor, who studies sleep, was interested in whether participants’ mind wandering displayed any neural hallmarks of dozing off. Using electroencephalogram recordings, the team showed that in those test periods, participants’ brains produced more of the slow waves that are dominant during sleep. Perhaps, the researchers say, mind wandering is like a form of light sleep that provides some of that state’s learning benefits. To better understand whether mind wandering might compensate for lost sleep, Simor and his colleagues next plan to study narcolepsy and sleep deprivation.

“We know that people spend significant amounts of time not focused on what they are doing,” Smallwood says. “The authors’ work is important because it helps us understand how reasonably complex forms of behavior can continue when people are focused on other things—and that even though our thoughts were elsewhere, the external behavior can still leave its mark on the person.”

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Thomas Fuchs

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The Supreme Court delivered an important victory to disabled children on Thursday, unanimously affirming their right to reasonable accommodations in public education. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for the court reiterated that schools engage in unlawful discrimination when they deny these accommodations to kids, even if officials are not acting in bad faith. His ruling provides a lifeline to schoolchildren throughout the country who are wrongly denied equal access to learning opportunities because of a disability.

Yet this victory comes with an asterisk: In a concurrence, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined, alarmingly, by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, launched an assault on civil rights law that would devastate disabled Americans’ ability to receive an education and participate in all aspects of public life. Thomas and Kavanaugh suggested that the long-standing interpretation of disability law is, in fact, unconstitutional, arguing that states should have far more leeway to discriminate against those with disabilities. We should expect such callous radicalism from Thomas. But Kavanaugh’s endorsement of this position is yet another ominous sign that the justice is drifting toward the hard-right flank of the court.

It is difficult to know exactly what to make of Kavanaugh’s drift to the right because he remains an intellectual lightweight who struggles to articulate and defend his views with any coherence. Is he just another MAGA-pilled jurist eager to promote Trump’s agenda? Did his bruising confirmation battle leave him with a lifelong grudge against Democrats that he acts upon by trashing progressive priorities from the bench? Has he fallen under the influence of Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito, who spurn centrism as craven capitulation to their perceived enemies on the left? Whatever the cause of his transformation, it is by now an undeniable fact that he has abandoned the middle of the court, sliding to the right of Roberts, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and sometimes even Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Thursday’s case, A. J. T. v. Osseo Area Schools, shows exactly why robust federal protections for disabled Americans remain so vital. The plaintiff, Ava Tharpe, “suffers from a rare form of epilepsy that severely limits her physical and cognitive functioning,” as Roberts put it. Her seizures are worst in the morning, leaving her able to learn only after about 12 p.m. each day. When Tharpe transferred to a new school district in 2015, officials refused to provide her with special evening instruction, leaving her with far fewer hours of instruction than her peers.

Eventually, Tharpe’s parents sued under several laws, including the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act, which broadly bar discrimination on the basis of disability. But the federal courts tossed out their suit. These courts acknowledged that Tharpe was denied equal access to education because of her disability. But they held that Tharpe was not entitled to an injunction or damages under the relevant statutes because she had not proven that school officials “acted with bad faith or gross misjudgment.” Mere “non-compliance” with the law, the courts concluded, was not enough to justify judicial intervention.

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Thomas and Kavanaugh suggested that the long-standing interpretation of disability law is, in fact, unconstitutional. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.

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Hmmmm…

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Medicare Usage by State

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Covid is stil killing people…

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For the first time since the COVID vaccines became available in pharmacies in 2021, the average person in the U.S. can’t count on getting a free annual shot against a disease that has been the main or a contributing cause of death for more than 1.2 million people around the country, including nearly 12,000 to date this year.

“COVID’s not done with us,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown University. “We have to keep using the tools that we have. It’s not like we get to forget about COVID.”

In recent weeks, the Department of Health and Human Services, led by prominent antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has announced a barrage of measures that are likely to reduce COVID vaccine access, leading to a swirl of confusion about what will be available for the 2025–2026 season. HHS officials did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Government officials appear to be limiting COVID shots to people who are aged 65 and older and to those who have certain preexisting health conditions—groups that have long been known to face a higher risk of developing severe COVID. Pregnant people and some children, meanwhile, appear to be explicitly excluded from access, despite plentiful evidence that vaccines are very safe and effective for them and that COVID infections can cause them significant harm.

Scientific American spoke with clinicians and public health experts about the latest COVID vaccine recommendations, what access may look like this fall, and how these policies might influence people’s vaccination choices and health.

What COVID vaccines will be manufactured this year?

Public health experts are monitoring a strain of the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 called NB.1.8.1, which was first detected early this year and last month became responsible for one in 10 COVID cases globally. So far, the new variant has mostly been reported in Asia and Europe. But it has also been picked up in airport surveillance in multiple U.S. states, says Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease physician and a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

The emergence of a new variant isn’t surprising, particularly at this time of year, Chin-Hong says. “It’s kind of acting like clockwork—maybe this might be the variant of the summer,” he adds. Still, NB.1.8.1 has led to concerns about a potential surge in cases, although Chin-Hong and other scientists don’t have any evidence so far that it causes more serious disease than other currently circulating strains.

“All of these new variants, they might be more transmissible, they might be more immune evasive, but I’ve seen no data whatsoever that suggests that they’re more pathogenic,” says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan.

Within the U.S., a strain called LP.8.1 has been the most common one detected since March. Both NB.1.8.1 and LP.8.1 are among the alphabet soup of strains that descended from a key ancestor lineage called Omicron JN.1, which dominated U.S. cases by early 2024.

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