How Your Brain Decides Without You

In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see. Plus: the mystery of the largest light in the sea; behind the scenes with science writer Alex Riley; and more. [View in browser]( | [Become a member]( EDITORS’ CHOICE June 4, 2023   Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here](. Good Morning! Here’s some of the latest and most popular stories from Nautilus—and this week’s Behind the Scenes with science writer [Alex Riley]( [READ NAUTILUS](   [COMMUNICATION]( [The Cellist and the Physicist]( A conversation between Yo-Yo Ma and Fabiola Gianotti. BY JOHN STEELE What happens when you bring together two people from different fields of expertise for a conversation? [Continue reading →]( Experience the endless possibilities and deep human connections that science offers [SUBSCRIBE TODAY](   [Stay in the Know with Knowable Magazine]( Smart Stories. Sound Science. Explore real-world questions through an evidence-based lens. [Get our newsletter]( delivered each week, for free. [Subscribe](   Popular This Week [ZOOLOGY]( [The Mystery of the Largest Light in the Sea]( This giant squid has the world’s biggest light-producing organs. But why? BY ALEX RILEY [Continue reading →]( [NEUROSCIENCE]( [Is Consciousness More Like Chess or the Weather?]( Our minds seem both physical and intangible. That paradox has gripped this neuroscientist since childhood. BY BRIAN GALLAGHER [Continue reading →]( [PSYCHOLOGY]( [Why Scientists Need to Get High]( Psychoactive drugs have long been hailed as miracle cures. But you can only understand the paths they blaze through the mind if you’ve traveled them. BY STEVE PAULSON [Continue reading →]( [NEUROSCIENCE]( [How Your Brain Decides Without You]( In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see. BY TOM VANDERBILT [Continue reading →](   [BEHIND THE SCENES]( [Alex Riley Takes Us Behind “The Mystery of the Largest Light in the Sea”]( From a very young age Alex Riley was fascinated with animals, particularly “all the different sorts of megafauna,” he said—the large and giant creatures—around the world. Growing up in rural England, he wrote about dinosaurs and created scrapbooks. He thinks it all appealed to him because nobody in his family seemed interested. His father and brother were in construction, and his mom was a hairdresser. “This is my thing. No one else has this,” he said. “Selfishly I just loved having this escape.” That escapism took him all the way to a PhD program in developmental biology. Riley quit two months in, though, “because I got scared away by four years of impending doom.” But his curiosity about the strange lives of Earth’s other inhabitants never faded. Riley’s latest look at one of nature’s curios had him puzzling over the deep-sea squid Taningia danae. In [“The Mystery of the Largest Light in the Sea,”]( his new story in Nautilus, Riley considers the evolutionary oddity of the big squid’s lemon-sized “photophores” amid the wider world of bioluminescent beings deep in the sea. “I dug into all of the research and spoke to the few people in the world who study this quite rare and lesser-known giant squid,” he said. [In our conversation](, Riley talks about the intriguing but scarce footage we have so far of Taningia danae. In one from 2020, a submersible encounters the squid about 70 meters down, and it just floats there for a little while. “We have these moments with creatures that seem to look back, and there’s something behind their behavior, or their eyes, like elephants and octopuses and the sort of sentient beings that we share this planet with,” Riley said. “And this video—I’ve watched it so many times. I’m just trying to think, What is it doing there? It’s opening and closing its eyelids on its photophores, on its light organs, and it just seemed curious.” Riley also mentioned his favorite theory for the adaptive purpose of the squid’s relatively huge light orbs. The idea is that the bioluminescent organs are a defense mechanism against its biggest predator—the sperm whale. To evade one, you either have to be very fast (which Taningia danae is not) or manage to hide. Perhaps, by suddenly flashing its light organs, the squid can “momentarily bleach the retina of the sperm whale,” giving the squid a few precious seconds to escape. I told Riley that it reminded me of a combat technique that some characters in the anime show Dragon Ball Z use to stun their foes, called [“solar flare.”]( “That sounds exactly what they’re doing,” Riley said. “Maybe it’s based on Taningia.” [Watch here.]( —Brian Gallagher, associate editor   [“The one place we can’t accompany our patients is over the threshold into madness.”]( [Historian Mike Jay, author of Psychonauts, explains why scientists went on psychedelic excursions.](   More in Communication [How Shannon Entropy Imposes Fundamental Limits on Communication]( What’s a message, really? Claude Shannon recognized that the elemental ingredient is surprise. BY KEVIN HARTNETT [Continue reading →]( [The Comet Year]( What the COVID-19 pandemic portends. BY CLAYTON DALTON [Continue reading →](   P.S. It’s heartening to hear the news that after 20 years languishing in a catatonic state, a woman finally [woke up]( from her mental illness. The key was in connecting her autoimmune condition—lupus—to her severe schizophrenia-like symptoms. Andrew Curry wrote about the controversial possibility that [insanity can strike from a suffering immune system.](   Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher   BECOME A MEMBER [An Artisanal Candle and a Nautilus Membership, Half-off]( For the first time, a subscription to Nautilus at any membership tier is half-off along with a purchase of [The Mother Of All Growth](, our limited-edition, organic soy candle perfumed with a custom Nautilus-inspired scent of rich, loamy earth. [Join Today]( Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us) your thoughts on today’s note. Plus, [browse our archive]( of past print issues, and inspire a friend to sign up for [the Nautilus newsletter](. [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( Copyright © 2023 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from nautil.us. 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