African elephants are the largest land animals on earth and significantly larger than their relatives in Asia, from which they are separated by millions of years of evolution. Nevertheless, Asian elephants have a 20 percent heavier brain, as scientists from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) were able to demonstrate together with international colleagues. They also showed that elephant brains­ triple in weight after birth. These results, published in the scientific journal “PNAS Nexus”, provide potential explanations for behavioural differences between African and Asian elephants as well as for the pachyderms' long youth, during which they gain enormous experience and learn social skills.

If you quickly move a camera from object to object, the abrupt shift between the two points causes a motion smear that might give you nausea. Our eyes, however, do movements like these two or three times per second. These rapid movements are called saccades, and although the visual stimulus during a saccade shifts abruptly across the retina, our brain seems to keep it under the hood: we never perceive the shift. New research shows that the speed of our saccades predicts the speed limit in our vision when an object becomes too fast to see. According to a study published in Nature Communications by researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence (TU Berlin), visual stimuli ––think a chipmunk darting around or a tennis ball hit with full force–– become invisible when they move at a speed, duration, and distance similar to those of one of our saccades. This suggests that the properties of the human visual system are best understood in the context of the movements of our eyes.

What is consciousness? For centuries, scientists and philosophers have tried to understand how the brain creates our inner world—how neural activity translates into the taste of coffee, for example, or the sting of pain. Now, an international, theory-neutral research consortium, led by the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has put two of today’s most studied theories of consciousness to the test. The results, published in Nature, challenge core assumptions of both models and propose a new way to study complex scientific questions.