Mind & Brain

For centuries, the contents of our minds have remained fundamentally private—thoughts, memories, and mental images locked away until we choose to express them. But what if that barrier could be crossed? Neuroscientist Dr. Tomoyasu Horikawa has developed a technique called "mind captioning" that translates patterns of brain activity into written sentences. The research demonstrates something remarkable: by combining fMRI scanning with artificial intelligence, meaningful aspects of what we see and remember can be decoded directly from the brain, without speech or language production.

What if the violence, conflict, and mental health crises defining our age are not failures of policy or culture, but consequences of biology? What if our brains simply haven't finished evolving?

What helps a young person withstand adversity—and could supportive relationships help protect them from suicide? Dr Lynne Fullerton has spent much of her career investigating these questions, from the long-term effects of childhood abuse to the protective role of adults in young people's lives.

Some months ago I directed a short film for Stuart Kauffman on the emergence of complex life. It opens with him standing in a forest, Attenborough-style, gesturing at the green chaos around him — eighty years old and visibly delighted by all of it. That delight is the thing to hold on to in what follows. Kauffman — theoretical biologist, complexity theorist, one of the founding minds of the Santa Fe Institute — has spent half a century at the edge of what equations can describe. We spoke about a theorem that explains three hundred thousand years of human history, why life is not a machine, and the quiet demolition of the dream of a Theory of Everything. The conversation has been edited for length; we've tried to leave the rest of it alone.