Aphantasia, the inability to form mental images, poses a serious challenge to an influential theory of abstract thought in ...

Summary: Researchers argue that aphantasia, the complete inability to voluntarily form mental images, fundamentally shatters Hume’s theory and modern imagistic models of cognition. Individuals with ...

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have explored the regions of the brain where concrete and abstract concepts materialize. A new study now explores if people who grow up in different cultures ...

Abstract concepts—such as justice, freedom or emotion—lack direct sensory referents and pose a central challenge to theories of mind and language. Traditional accounts have proposed that abstract ...

An insect's brain is capable of constructing and handling abstract concepts. It can even use two different concepts simultaneously in order to make a decision when faced with a new situation. This ...

In a series of studies over more than 20 years, evolutionary biologists have demonstrated that paper wasps, despite their tiny brains, have an impressive capacity to learn, remember and make social ...

String theory, quantum gravity, time dilation. Why do these advanced physics concepts come easily to some of us but not others? The trope that the human brain didn’t evolve to understand advanced ...

Wasps can tell the difference between pairs of stimuli that are the same or different, a task that requires the use of abstract concepts that only a small group of animals are known to grasp. The ...

At most schools a reading of Charlotte's Web might end with a bunch of little spiders made from pipe cleaners and a few tears at the poignancy of the story itself. At Preshil independent school, the ...