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Our Favorite Neuroscience Stories of 2022
Our Favorite Neuroscience Stories of 2022,This year, neuroscience researchers made important discoveries related to how neurodegeneration attacks the human brain, hooked cultured neurons up to machinery to teach them to play a video game, and more.

Our Favorite Neuroscience Stories of 2022

ABOVE: ROBYN CROOK; CORTICAL LABS; © ISTOCK.COM, PEEPO; © ISTOCK.COM, ARTUR PLAWGO; WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

Do Invertebrates Have Emotions?

Anecdotally, it’s difficult to watch some of the more intelligent animals navigating the world or interacting with one another without concluding that they have emotions. However, empirically studying whether or not that’s true has proven difficult, as finding a definitive answer to a big philosophical question by means of lab experiments is not an easy task. While there’s growing evidence that primates and some other vertebrates have emotional states, researchers debate whether the same is true for animals further removed from humans, such as octopuses, and also debate what it means to have an emotional state versus an internal feeling in the first place. “I think it’s easier for people to say, ‘Oh, my dog has emotions,’ but harder for people to recognize emotions in a crab, for instance. It’s a very automatic response,” University of York philosopher Kristin Andrews tells The Scientist. “But then you have to be careful of anthropomorphizing and making sure you’re not just projecting your own feelings [onto the animal].”




MRI image of brain with glioblastoma

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

See “Our Favorite Neuroscience Stories of 2021”