Neuroanatomy of social dominance
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 7-Aug-2025 21:11 ET (8-Aug-2025 01:11 GMT/UTC)
Disproportionately high support for the Conservative Party among Anglicans is acting as a buffer against the increasing partisan and volatile Tory support base, research shows.
New research from The University of Texas at Arlington reveals that social media platforms can play a potentially life-saving role for young people navigating difficult circumstances at home.
Self-checkout registers have become ubiquitous in grocery stores as they provide convenience and efficiency for customers. They also offer more privacy with no human directly monitoring your purchases. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at whether shoppers prefer self-checkout when buying potentially stigmatized items, including condoms, pregnancy tests, period products, hemorrhoid cream, and diarrhea relief.
Recent research shows that your brain doesn’t pay attention in one smooth stream—instead, it switches focus in quick bursts, about 8 times per second. This process, called “attentional sampling,” helps your brain deal with too much information by jumping back and forth between different things you're seeing. It’s kind of like your brain is taking rapid snapshots instead of watching a constant video. And when you need to focus on more than one thing, the rhythm splits to allow focusing on each one around 4 times per second. This helps explain how we make sense of a busy world, even when we don’t notice it happening. According to the researchers, this rhythmic alternation between the objects or features that capture our attention helps resolve the competition for neural processing that emerges among them. Our attention is always moving—even when we think we’re locked in.