If you live anywhere affected by the recent heatwaves, you may well have spent your nights tossing and turning, trying out different sleeping positions in an attempt to get comfortable. But what does the evidence say about which sleeping positions are actually the best?
Studies on everyone from seafarers on container ships to welders in Nigeria might be able to help us, although given how important sleep is to us it’s surprising how few large-scale studies have been conducted.
First you need a way of working out which position people are sleeping in. You can ask them of course, but we only really remember the way we were lying when we were trying to fall asleep and the position we wake up in. To find out more, researchers have tried a variety of techniques including filming people while they sleep or getting them to use wearable technology that monitors their movements.
In Hong Kong, researchers are developing what they call the “Blanket Accommodative Sleep Posture Classification System”, which uses infrared depth cameras that can detect a person’s sleep position even through a thick blanket.
Researchers in Denmark used small motion-sensor detectors attached to volunteers’ thighs, upper backs, and upper arms before they went to sleep to establish their favoured sleeping position. They found that during their time in bed, people spent just over half their time on their sides, around 38% on their backs, and 7% on their fronts. The older the people were, the more time they spent on their sides.
This bias towards sleeping on our sides is something we develop only as we become adults, because children over the age of three spend on average an equal amount of time sleeping on their sides, back and fronts.
Babies, meanwhile, sleep mainly on their backs because they’re put in their cots this way for safety reasons.
So sleeping on your side is the most common position, and we could trust the wisdom of the crowd to choose the position where they sleep best, but what about the data? A very small observational study in which people could sleep however they preferred found that those who slept on their right side slept slightly better than those on their left, followed by those on their backs.
If you find it easy to sleep on your side, then it’s probably also best for anyone else trying to get to sleep nearby. On one occasion, while touring a submarine for a radio programme I was making, the submariners showed me their sleeping quarters, where the bunks were stacked so closely on top of each other that it was hard to turn over. That meant they tended to sleep on their backs, so they told me it was a race to get to sleep first before the whole cabin was full of snoring men.
Another small study looked at seafarers working on merchant container ships and found that respiratory disturbances such as snoring were more common when the seafarers were sleeping on their backs.
Scientific research over the past 30 years has revealed a patchwork of potential causes of autism. Most of them are genetic—the condition is between 60 and 90 percent heritable—and some involve nongenetic risk factors that might impact development during pregnancy.
“We’ve found a great deal of the underlying [causes],” says Helen Tager-Flusberg, an autism researcher and a professor emerita at Boston University. But how these different risk factors come together as the brain develops remains a challenge to piece together. “Autism is not a simple disorder,” she says. “There are no simple answers. There are no so-called smoking guns.”
Even so, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the U.S. secretary of health and human services, talks about autism in a way that suggests he thinks there are simple and direct causes. He often refers to the steady rise in autism prevalence (which is likely due to improved screening and diagnosis) as an indicator that
we’re in the middle of an “autism epidemic” driven by “environmental toxins.” He has also refused to disavow the long-debunked idea that vaccines cause autism. This month, as part of Kennedy’s effort to find “the root causes of autism,” the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced that they will create a “data platform” to study the condition. In April, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya had described plans for “national disease registries, including a new one for autism.” The plan involved collecting “comprehensive” private health data on autism that would represent “broad coverage” of the U.S. population, leading autism advocacy organizations, civil rights groups, and research scientists to warn of medical privacy concerns. (Shortly after outlets reported on Bhattacharya’s statements in April, HHS denied that it planned to create an “autism registry.”)
In a budget hearing on Wednesday, Kennedy called for an end to genetic research into autism. “I don’t think we should be funding that genetic work anymore,” he said. “What we really need to do now is to identify the environmental toxins.”
In response to this dismissal of well-established science, Tager-Flusberg has organized a coalition of scientists to push back. The Coalition of Autism Scientists now has 258 members and is still growing.
Scientific American spoke with Tager-Flusberg about Kennedy’s statements this week and how the autism community is responding.
In a Congressional budget hearing Wednesday afternoon, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said: “Autism is an epidemic, and the genes do not cause epidemics. They can contribute a vulnerability, but you need an environmental toxin. It’s like cigarettes and smoking.” What was your reaction to that?
There is no reason that we need to refer to the increased prevalence rates, which have been rising steadily for many years now, as an epidemic. This is not the definition of an epidemic, so I take issue with highlighting that.
Second of all, genetics are the primary contributing factor to autism. We know specific genes and variants confer increased risk, even in cases where there aren’t any clear environmental contributions. If anything, it’s the other way around—it’s the environmental factors that add to or interact with the genetic risk for autism.
Take one of the very well-regulated nongenetic factors: parental age, particularly paternal age. What we think is going on is that, as parents age, their germ cells [which develop into eggs or sperm] are changing, and so this is leading to alterations in the DNA that then confer risk for autism.
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Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks during a news conference at the Department of Health and Human Services on April 16, 2025, in Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images
Working long hours comes with a slew of health issues, from too much stress to disturbed sleep, heart conditions, and mental health disorders like anxiety and depression.
It may even cause changes in the brain, according to a new report published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. Researchers from Korea found that people who regularly work long hours had significant brain differences compared to people who worked less.
Wanhyung Lee, from the department of preventive medicine at Chung-Ang University in Seoul, and his team studied 110 health care workers—some of whom worked more than 52 hours a week, which under Korean law constitutes overwork, and some of whom worked less. All had MRIs that allowed the scientists to analyze differences in the volume and concentration of certain brain tissues.
People who were overworked showed changes in 17 brain regions compared to those who worked typical hours. These differences included areas responsible for executive functions like logical reasoning, as well as managing emotions.
Lee says the results surprised him, in part because they suggest that the brain changes in response to stress and anxiety, with some potential negative consequences. “We anticipated that prolonged stress from overwork would affect brain structure, but finding increased volume in certain brain areas was somewhat unexpected,” he wrote in an email to TIME. “Our results suggest a potential neuroadaptive response, meaning the brain might initially try to compensate for increased cognitive and emotional demands. These surprising findings underscore the complexity of how the brain responds to prolonged occupational stress.”
Advances in brain imaging now make it possible to detect even small volume differences, Lee says. “These technological breakthroughs have empowered researchers to explore previously invisible biological changes induced by prolonged stress or excessive workloads, thus opening up an entirely new dimension in occupational and environmental health research.”
The changes his team identified involve areas of the brain that are responsible for things like memory, decision-making, attention, planning, and problem-solving. “Changes here could impact a person’s ability to efficiently manage tasks, make decisions, and maintain concentration,” he says.
Differences in other areas could affect how well people regulate emotions; the changes they saw may indicate less emotional stability, increased anxiety, and problems interpreting emotional cues or managing interpersonal connections.
Would reducing workload alleviate or reverse some of these changes? It’s too soon to know if these alterations are permanent, Lee says. “Longitudinal studies will be essential to understand if these brain structural changes are reversible or persist long-term.” He plans to follow up this study with longer-term data and larger populations to determine what happens to these brain changes over time, and whether adjusting workloads can reduce or reverse them.
In the meantime, there are things people can do to alleviate some of the negative effects of overwork on their health, even if they can’t adjust their hours. Getting enough sleep and physical activity, as well as addressing stress with mindfulness or relaxation techniques, can help. But Lee says the burden shouldn’t rest entirely on employees. Businesses should limit excessive working hours, provide stress-management resources, and promote work-life balance “to protect their employees’ long-term brain health and productivity.”
Ellen Stromdahl was at a garden party in coastal Virginia in June 2023 when her friend Albert Duncan stood up from where he was sitting and abruptly fainted. Duncan is an outdoorsman in his mid-80s — still active and healthy for his age. Stromdahl, an entomologist who works for the United States Army Public Health Center, the Army’s public health arm, rushed to his side. As Duncan came to, she noticed that his tanned skin was tinged with yellow. “This man looks jaundiced,” she thought to herself.
Duncan spent the next several days in and out of the emergency room. His doctors administered countless blood tests and ruled out the usual suspects for an octogenarian — heart disease, diabetes, pneumonia. Finally, on Stromdahl’s recommendation, Duncan’s wife, Nancy, asked his doctors to test him for babesiosis, a rare malaria-like disease caused by microscopic parasites carried by black-legged ticks. The test came back positive not just for babesiosis but also for Lyme disease, another far more common illness caused by the same type of tick.
If Duncan’s doctors had caught the infections sooner, they could have eradicated them with a combination of oral antibiotics and antiparasitic medications. But Duncan, weeks into his illness, needed a procedure called an exchange transfusion. Doctors pumped all of the infected blood out of his body and replaced it with donor blood. About two weeks after the garden party, he was well again.
Babesiosis is rare — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports around 2,000 cases in the United States every year. But what made Duncan’s case even more unusual is that he contracted babesiosis in Virginia, a state that registered just 17 locally acquired cases of the disease between 2016 and 2023.
It got Stromdahl wondering if babesiosis could be becoming more common in Virginia and neighboring states. She spent the following two years working with a team of 21 tick researchers from across the eastern U.S. and South Africa to assess the prevalence of Babesia microti, the parasite that causes babesiosis, in ticks and humans in those states from 2009 to 2024.
The results of the study, published in April in the Journal of Medical Entomology, reveal that the Babesia parasite is rapidly expanding through the mid-Atlantic. This shift, which has coincided with changing weather patterns, could pose a serious threat to people in communities where the disease has long been considered rare.
“Wherever we found positive ticks, there were cases,” Stromdahl said. “They’re small numbers, but that’s why we want to give the early warning before more people get sick.”
One in four cases of babesiosis is asymptomatic. People who do develop symptoms, especially older adults and immunocompromised people, can get quite sick with fever, chills, anemia, fatigue, and jaundice. Untreated, the parasites, which infect and destroy red blood cells, can lead to organ failure and death.
Babesiosis is typically found in the Northeast and the Upper Midwest. Between 2015 and 2022, case counts in the states that regularly report the disease — Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin — rose by 9 percent every year, a development researchers attribute in large part to warmer temperatures caused by climate change, which afford black-legged ticks more opportunities to bite people in a given year and more habitat to spread into.
When you’re trying to learn something new — like, say, making that new sales demo really sing — you need to practice. When you’re trying to gain expertise, how much you practice is definitely important.
But even more important is the way you practice.
Most people simply repeat the same moves. Like playing scales on the piano, over and over again. Or going through the same list of vocabulary words, over and over again. Or, well, repeating anything over and over again in the hopes you will master that task.
Not only will your skills not improve as quickly as they could, in some cases, they may actually get worse.
According to research from Johns Hopkins, “What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.”
Why? The most likely cause is reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.
Here’s a simple example: trying to get better at shooting free throws in basketball. The conditions are fixed. The rim is always 10 feet above the floor. The free-throw line is always 15 feet from the basket.
In theory, shooting from the same spot, over and over again, will help you ingrain the right motions into your muscle memory so your accuracy and consistency will improve.
And, of course, that does happen — but a better, faster way to improve is to slightly adjust the conditions in subsequent practice sessions.
Maybe one time you’ll stand a few inches closer. Another time you might stand a few inches to one side. Another time, you might use a slightly heavier, or lighter, ball.
In short, each time you practice, you make the conditions a little different. That primes the reconsolidation pump — and helps you learn much more quickly.
But Not Too Different — or Too Soon
But you can’t adjust the conditions more than slightly. Do something too different and you’ll simply create new memories, not reconsolidated ones.
“If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation,” the researchers say. “The modification between sessions needs to be subtle.”
And you’ll also need to space out your practice sessions appropriately.
The researchers gave the participants a six-hour gap between training sessions, because neurological research indicates it takes that long for new memories to reconsolidate.
Practice differently too soon, and you haven’t given yourself enough time to “internalize” what you’ve learned. You won’t be able to modify old memories — and therefore improve your skills — because those memories haven’t had the chance to become old memories.
So if you want to dramatically improve how quickly you learn a new skill, try this.
How to Learn a New Skill
The key to improvement is making small, smart changes, evaluating the results, discarding what doesn’t work, and further refining what does work.
When you constantly modify and refine something you already do well, you can do it even better.
Say you want to improve a skill; to make things simple, we’ll pretend you want to master a new presentation.
1. Rehearse the basic skill. Run through your presentation a couple of times under the same conditions you’ll eventually face when you do it live. Naturally, the second time through will be better than the first; that’s how practice works. But then, instead of going through it a third time …
2. Wait. Give yourself at least six hours so your memory can consolidate. (Which probably means waiting until tomorrow before you practice again, which is just fine.)
3. Practice again, but this time …
Go a little faster. Speak a little — just a little — faster than you normally do. Run through your slides slightly faster. Increasing your speed means you’ll make more mistakes, but that’s OK — in the process, you’ll modify old knowledge with new knowledge, and lay the groundwork for improvement. Or …
Go a little slower. The same thing will happen. (Plus, you can experiment with new techniques — including the use of silence for effect — that aren’t apparent when you present at your normal speed.) Or …
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Photo from Susanne Alfredsson/EyeEm/Getty Images .
Just more than 100 years ago, on March 18, 1925, a tornado slashed across the U.S. Midwest with no warning at all and killed 695 people—a massive number for a single outbreak. Today, those in a twister’s path get a take-cover notice eight to 18 minutes before a strike on average. And as recently as 1992, what looked like a minor tropical disturbance intensified with shocking speed into Hurricane Andrew. There was little time to prepare for the storm, and much of the resulting property damage in South Florida was massive. But by last year, forecasters could give several days’ warning that the then-approaching storms Helene and Milton were likely to abruptly morph into monsters.
Such improvements have cumulatively saved thousands of lives and likely hundreds of billions of dollars across the U.S. And they happened only through concerted federal government investment in studying weather events, improving computer forecast models, and making continent- and ocean-spanning efforts to collect the data that make those forecasts possible. Now, meteorology experts are urgently warning that the Trump administration’s staff firings and funding cuts at the National Weather Service (and its parent, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) threaten to disrupt these crucial operations and turn back the clock on forecasting.
“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” wrote five former NWS directors from both Democratic and Republican administrations in an open letter on May 2.
Ultimately, storm experts say, disruption caused by existing and proposed cuts will hit multiple fronts. An understaffed and underfunded NWS could mean that a tornado warning doesn’t come in time, that a hurricane forecast is off just enough so that the wrong coastal areas are evacuated or that flights are less likely to be routed around turbulence. “The net result is going to be massive economic harm,” said climate scientist Daniel Swain during one of his regular talks hosted on YouTube. “As we break these things, eventually it will become painfully and unignorably obvious what we’ve broken and how important it was. And it’s going to be unbelievably expensive in the scramble to try and get it back—and we might not be able to get it back.”
The NWS’s budget pays for weather services that benefit industry
For the past 20 years, a little more than 4,000 NWS staff members have put together 24-7 forecasts for the country’s approximately 300 million people every day of the year. “We have [a more] efficient level of [staff compared] to the number of people we’re serving than any other country in the world by two orders of magnitude,” says Louis Uccellini, who was NWS director from 2013 to 2022 and signed the open letter.
The NWS punches above its economic weight, too: it costs the average American about $4 per year. “It’s a cup of coffee,” says JoAnn Becker, president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization, a union that represents the NWS and several NOAA offices. With one-third of the U.S. economy—from farming to trucking to tourism—being sensitive to weather and climate, the NWS provides an overall benefit of $100 billion to the economy. This is roughly 10 times what the service costs to run, according to an American Meteorological Society white paper. Recent improvements to hurricane forecasts alone have saved up to $5 billion for each hurricane that hit the U.S. since 2007, according to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a nonpartisan, nonprofit economic research organization. In comparison, the NWS’s entire budget for 2024 was less than $1.4 billion.
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A house submerged in floodwaters, in Pointe-Aux-Chenes, Terrebonne Parish, La. bMark Felix/Bloomberg/Getty Images
After a delicious feast, the last thing many people want to do is exercise. Food is sloshing inside a bloated belly, and sleepiness is setting in. A nap seems like the right move. But while it might feel good at the time, there is another activity you should probably be doing instead: walking.
Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, there are many opportunities for feasting on seasonal foods. Family gatherings may feature that one aunt who sighs after cleaning her plate before saying, “Who’s up for a nice, brisk walk?” Everyone is entitled to their own responses to this ambitious, well-meaning aunt, but there’s something to getting some movement after eating.
A Turkey Trot 5K isn’t the first thing most want to do after a few plates of festive carbs. Nobody needs to do a 5K, though, or even what’s conventionally considered exercise. Just a little light movement is enough.
Science in action — In February 2022, a meta-analysis published in the journal Sports Medicine examined seven studies on how walking after a meal impacted glucose levels. Of those seven, the researchers also looked at four for insulin levels and three for blood pressure. The studies looked at how post-meal glucose metabolism varied based on whether one spent time sitting, standing, or walking in a lab setting.
These researchers gleaned that across these studies, both standing and walking improved one’s glucose metabolism after eating compared to sitting for a while. The novel finding — they write in the paper — is that even standing has benefits. However, a gentle walk assuaged glucose levels far more than standing did. In fact, the difference between sitting and standing’s impact on blood glucose levels was slight.
Overall, they found that even walking for even two minutes after a meal tempers blood sugar.
Why it’s a hack — A few things happen in the body after a meal. Blood diverts to the organs that aid in digestion and nutrient absorption. With more blood coursing through the digestive system, less oxygen circulates through the rest of the body. Going for a walk improves circulation because all your muscles require blood.
“Now you’re telling the body, ‘Wait a minute, we need the blood in the muscles deliver oxygen to help you ambulate,” Steven Malin, an endocrinology and metabolic health professor at Rutgers University, tells Inverse. Going for a walk doesn’t detract from the digestive process but helps create balance in the body, Malin says. He adds that walking after a big meal reduces gastrointestinal issues because movement makes the body absorb food’s nutrients more quickly.
On this note, the meta-analysis posits that the greater benefits on glucose and insulin levels from walking than standing come from the intensity and frequency of muscular activity. In other words, exercising our muscles is part of the biological pathway that mediates glucose and insulin levels.
Our bodies also produce a flurry of hormones. Especially after a large mea
l, feel-good chemicals like serotonin and dopamine will float around, but with that good feeling comes drowsiness. In contrast, cortisol, glucagon, and norepinephrine are the counter-regulatory hormones that energize us. These hormones send the body opposing signals, but seizing those hormones that offer a surge of energy can help head off sluggishness.
The body also more efficiently breaks down food when it doesn’t have a ton on its proverbial plate. Taking a walk right after Thanksgiving dinner offsets the total amount of calories the body must process later. Think of it like doing homework during a free period in high school, so you wouldn’t have as much to do at home that night.
How it affects longevity — Malin’s mantra is, “Any movement is good movement.” You don’t have to race a triathlon to reap the benefits of exercise. Everyone’s aunt might be suggesting a nice family walk, but other options include giving piggyback rides to any children present, wrestling with the cousins, or even doing some arm stretches with or without weights. Walking isn’t the only way to get the blood flowing.
A bomb from a black hole would probably be the most destructive weapon in the universe. Hypothetically, it could be created by wrapping one of these cosmic monsters in mirrors and waiting for it to go “boom.” Now Hendrik Ulbricht of the University of Southampton in England and his colleagues have demonstrated this principle, called superradiance, in the lab using a rotating metal cylinder instead of a black hole. They submitted their results, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, to the preprint server arXiv.org in late March.
“This work shows that a ‘black hole bomb’ can actually be built in the laboratory,” says physicist Vitor Cardoso of the Niels Bohr Institute in Denmark, who was not involved in the study. “It thus provides a solid basis for studying the entire physics of black holes.”
Among the strangest objects in the universe, black holes pack so much mass into such a small space that they can radically warp spacetime. A black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that within a certain distance, nothing can escape it, not even light. Theorist Roger Penrose is one of the pioneers who first studied black holes mathematically in detail, work for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. And amid that early work, he realized something surprising.
As Penrose knew, nothing stands still in our cosmos, not even black holes. These massive monsters can spin, distorting spacetime in the process to form a kind of vortex. An approaching object can be caught up in this vortex and spiral around the spinning black hole. Even before the object passes the event horizon, beyond which not even light can escape gravity’s clutches, it reaches an area that physicists call the “ergosphere.” There, the object would have to move faster than light to escape the rotation around the black hole.
This ergosphere is a strange place, as Penrose noted, because objects there can possess negative energy. A particle, for example, could split into two equal-but-opposite parts: one with negative energy and another with positive energy. The former would then crash into the black hole (thus reducing the black hole’s energy), allowing the latter to escape the cosmic behemoth’s mighty grip. An external observer would see a particle with a certain energy falling toward the black hole, only to apparently rebound outward with higher energy. The black hole loses part of its rotational energy in the process.
Black Hole Mining and Superradiance
In principle, this would allow black holes to serve as gigantic sources of energy. The process could not only imbue massive objects with more energy but also amplify electromagnetic waves in a phenomenon called superradiance. This realization spurred some physicists to even imagine how advanced alien civilizations might use superradiance to generate energy. But despite how relatively simple it is to describe on paper, no one knew how the signal of superradiance could be observed in real black holes. Thus, the concept initially remained mere speculation.
This ergosphere is a strange place, as Penrose noted, because objects there can possess negative energy. A particle, for example, could split into two equal-but-opposite parts: one with negative energy and another with positive energy. The former would then crash into the black hole (thus reducing the black hole’s energy), allowing the latter to escape the cosmic behemoth’s mighty grip. An external observer would see a particle with a certain energy falling toward the black hole, only to apparently rebound outward with higher energy. The black hole loses part of its rotational energy in the process.
Black Hole Mining and Superradiance
In principle, this would allow black holes to serve as gigantic sources of energy. The process could not only imbue massive objects with more energy but also amplify electromagnetic waves in a phenomenon called superradiance. This realization spurred some physicists to even imagine how advanced alien civilizations might use superradiance to generate energy. But despite how relatively simple it is to describe on paper, no one knew how the signal of superradiance could be observed in real black holes. Thus, the concept initially remained mere speculation.
In 1971, however, two years after Penrose first described this phenomenon, physicist Yakov Zel’dovich published research that suggested that black holes aren’t the only objects that can be tapped as superradiant energy sources. Any rotating, axially symmetrical body that absorbs electromagnetic radiation, such as a metal cylinder, can also exhibit superradiance under certain circumstances. “Roughly speaking, the rotating absorber must rotate faster
than the phase rotation of the incident radiation,” explains physicist Maria Chiara Braidotti of the University of Glasgow in Scotland, who was involved in the latest work. “If this condition is met, the absorption coefficient of the cylinder changes sign, thus amplifying the radiation.”
Zel’dovich even went one step further by showing that superradiance could also take place in a vacuum and wouldn’t require an incoming electromagnetic wave. That’s because on quantum scales, the vacuum is anything but empty. At any time, pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles can pop into existence, although they typically immediately annihilate each other again. The phenomenon is known as vacuum fluctuation. And these fluctuations could also be amplified in the vicinity of black holes, or a rotating metal cylinder. “Stephen Hawking didn’t believe this idea and tried to refute it,” explains Marion Cromb, a researcher in Ulbricht’s group at the University of Southampton and a contributor to the new work. “Not only did [Hawking] admit that Zel’dovich was right, but he was also able to prove that even nonrotating black holes—without an ergosphere—spontaneously emit radiation.” This realization led to the discovery of Hawking radiation.
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An artist’s rendition of a black hole surrounded by a glowing accretion disc of material, the light from which is warped by the strong gravity. In principle, energy could be harvested from a spinning black hole, and lab-based demonstrations are beginning to show physicists how this could occur. Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images
A few years ago, I decided to retrain as a neuroscientist. It was a leap into the unknown — no roadmap, just a desire to grow. I chose to approach this time of change with curiosity, and I started a weekly newsletter to document what I learned. Suddenly, my doubts became fuel for discovery.
What I didn’t know at the time was that this systematic curiosity was actively reshaping my brain in ways that would build resilience for navigating future changes.
Curiosity is often treated as a personality quirk — something childlike and playful, maybe even optional. But neuroscience paints a different picture. When we’re curious, the brain’s dopaminergic system — the same one that lights up when we anticipate a reward — kicks into gear. Simply put, curiosity makes us feel good about the prospect of discovering something new.
It also helps us learn more efficiently, enhancing hippocampal activity and boosting our capacity to form and retain new memories. Studies show that when people are curious about a topic, they not only remember the specific information they were interested in but also retain unrelated material better.
Perhaps most importantly, curiosity promotes neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to new experiences. This makes it an ideal cognitive state for those inevitable moments of change when we need to break established neural patterns and form new connections.
Curiosity in times of change
Change, by nature, introduces uncertainty. And the human brain typically responds to uncertainty by activating the amygdala, triggering the same stress responses as physical danger.
What curiosity does is transform that uncertainty from a threat into an invitation.
First, curiosity increases our tolerance for prediction error: the gap between what we expect and what we actually experience. This makes us more flexible in our thinking, less reactive, and better at updating our mental models.
There’s also a balancing act happening between two major brain networks: The default mode network (associated with imagination and introspection) and the executive control network (responsible for goal-oriented behavior) often take turns.
Curiosity helps synchronize these networks, allowing us to envision possibilities while also taking action — the exact balance needed to navigate change.
Emotionally, curiosity can also act as a buffer. When we view an unexpected situation through a curious lens (“what can I learn from this?”), we are less likely to spiral into anxiety or avoidance. This cognitive reframe can dramatically alter how we experience the inherent uncertainty of change.
5 ways to navigate change with curiosity
Curiosity isn’t a fixed trait you either have or lack — it’s a cognitive skill that can be developed. Here are five ways to cultivate it, especially during times of change:
1. Ask “what if?” instead of “what now?”
Reframe fear-based responses with questions that invite exploration. Instead of “I don’t know how to handle this new role,” try “What if I approached this role as a learning opportunity?” This simple shift activates your prefrontal cortex rather than your amygdala, which will help minimize stress in times of change.
A year ago this weekend, the sun’s activity created some of the most spectacular auroras on record, with displays visible as far south as Florida.
The incredible spectacles last May (and another auroral outburst last October) were partly a matter of luck because several factors, some of them serendipitous, affect the appearance of aurora. But the sun had been primed to put on a show as it approached the maximum phase of its 11-year activity cycle—and that high activity continues today. This solar cycle still has the potential to cause more celestial spectacles before activity calms down. And scientists say that the coming solar cycles may be even more eventful. But it remains quite difficult to predict the sun’s behavior.
“Solar storms—it’s a probabilistic thing, so sometimes they don’t always do what you would expect,” says Lisa Upton, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute.
The Sun Right Now
The sun is essentially a massive liquid magnet. Heliophysicists gauge our star’s activity by tallying the number of sunspots—relatively “cold” knots of its magnetic field that are often the source of radiation and plasma outbursts—on its surface. (Scientists monitor this tally in real time, but they evaluate the solar cycle’s stages based on smoothed averages over many months. So the formal declaration of a cycle’s solar maximum and minimum always happens after the fact.)
The number of sunspots naturally rises and falls over about 11 years, during which the sun’s magnetic poles first strengthen, then weaken and finally flip. When the sun’s magnetic field is calmest, with one pole that is firmly positive and one that is firmly negative, activity is at its minimum, as it was most recently around December 2019, and the star is sometimes entirely free of blemishes.
For more than a year now, the sun has been in the opposite phase—the solar maximum—with a messy magnetic field, plenty of sunspots and regular outbursts. August 2024 produced the most sunspots of any recent month, with more than 200 such storms.
Sunspots have since become less numerous, but it’s still unclear whether the solar maximum is truly on its way out. “We’ve had a little bit of a slowdown in activity [during] the last couple months. That’s not too surprising,” Upton says. “A question at this point, which will be interesting, is whether or not we’re going to have another little spike in activity.”
She says that if such a spike were to happen, it would likely come within about three months, mirroring a small spike that occurred in June and July 2023. “But the sun likes to surprise us,” Upton adds, “so we’ll see if that happens.”
Long-Term Cycles
Even as scientists watch the current solar cycle unfold, they’re also working to understand what future cycles might bring.
That’s a difficult task, given that modern science is only in the 25th activity cycle, in which researchers have made plentiful sunspot observations. More sophisticated observations that help scientists understand the sun in detail, such as space-based observations and magnetic data, are even newer, with some offering insight into only a couple of solar cycles thus far. Scientists can study tree rings and ice cores to get a basic sense of solar activity before observations began, but these data are less detailed and don’t provide precise sunspot counts.
One hypothesis suggests that the sun displays a longer-term variability called the Gleissberg cycle, named for astronomer Wolfgang Gleissberg, who posited such 80-year cycles in the 1960s. (Other proposed longer-duration cycles in solar behavior include the Suess–de Vries cycle, lasting 195 to 235 years, and the Hallstatt cycle, stretching over some 2,400 years.) And a new analysis of protons trapped in the inner radiation belt that surrounds Earth suggests a new Gleissberg cycle may be beginning.
Not all heliophysicists are sold on the Gleissberg cycle, however, given the scant data scientists have to work with. “It’s kind of debatable whether or not this is a physical phenomenon versus a statistical phenomenon,” Upton says.
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Massive solar flares, graceful eruptions of solar material, and an enormous sunspot make up some of the imagery captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory in 2013 and 2014. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/SDO/S. Wiessinger
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James' World 2 