Artemis II Turns the Moon From Destination Into Terrain: Artemis II’s lunar flyby was more than a record-setting stunt. As Ars Technica frames it, the mission helped transform the Moon from a distant symbol into a place to be actively explored. The four-person crew broke the human distance record, surpassing Apollo 13 and reaching roughly 252,756 miles from Earth during the far-side pass. But the deeper significance was observational: astronauts studied craters, basins, color variations, and surface textures in real time, giving the Moon a physical immediacy absent from most Apollo-era public memory. The mission also underscored the shift from brief heroic visits to sustained reconnaissance, with Orion serving as a platform for testing systems, refining deep-space operations, and preparing for later landings. In that sense, Artemis II made the Moon feel less mythic and more mappable. (Ars Technica)

Body-Focused Mind Wandering May Be Better for Mental Health Than Expected: Mind wandering is usually discussed as a nuisance, but a new study suggests not all drifting thoughts are equal. In MRI experiments, researchers tracked spontaneous thought alongside bodily signals such as breathing, heartbeat, and stomach activity. They found a distinct kind of “body wandering,” in which attention turns inward toward physical sensations rather than outward toward abstract rumination. People who showed more of this body-focused style reported fewer symptoms associated with depression and ADHD. The implication is interesting: some forms of mental drift may be regulatory rather than disruptive, especially when they strengthen interoception, the brain’s readout of the body’s internal state. The study also pushes resting-state neuroscience in a more embodied direction by arguing that the body is not background noise but part of the cognitive event itself. (Science News)

Echolocation Shows How Perception Builds One Click at a Time: A new eNeuro study gives a rare real-time look at how the brain constructs perception from sparse sensory evidence. Researchers recorded brain activity in expert blind echolocators and sighted novices as they listened to sets of clicks and echoes and judged where an object was located. The key finding is that perception did not arrive all at once. Each click-echo pair added another increment of evidence, letting the brain gradually accumulate enough information to make a spatial decision. One expert needed only two click-echo pairs to locate an object. The work matters beyond echolocation itself because it offers a clean model of how perception unfolds over time, rather than appearing as a single instantaneous snapshot.
(Science News)

UCLA Researchers Argue AI Still Lacks the Human ‘Body Gap’: One of the more consequential cognition-adjacent stories this week comes from a Neuron paper highlighted by UCLA. The argument is that even advanced multimodal AI systems can describe human experience without actually sharing the bodily grounding that makes human cognition what it is. A model can discuss thirst, pain, or reaching for a glass, but it does not know those states through a body situated in space and social life. The authors call this the “body gap,” and they suggest it has implications for AI safety and alignment. In effect, the paper pushes back on loose claims that language competence alone is enough to approximate human-like understanding. For consciousness and cognition reporting, this matters because it sharpens the distinction between symbolic fluency and embodied mind. (EurekAlert!)

One Week of Intensive Meditation Produced Brain and Body Changes: A University of California San Diego study, summarized this week, reports that just seven days of intensive meditation and related mind-body practices produced measurable changes across brain and body systems. Researchers saw signs of improved brain efficiency, increased immune signaling, boosts in endogenous pain-relief chemistry, and indications of stronger neural connectivity. The striking angle is that some of the observed brain signatures resembled states more often associated with psychedelics, but without any drug intervention. That makes this an unusually strong entry in the growing literature comparing contemplative practices with pharmacological altered states. It does not solve the science of consciousness, but it adds to a serious line of inquiry: that training attention and bodily awareness can alter the architecture of experience more quickly and more deeply than many people assume. (ScienceDaily)

A Schizophrenia-Linked Mutation May Lock the Brain Into Outdated Models of Reality: A new schizophrenia-related study frames one core symptom in cognitive terms: the inability to update reality models when circumstances change. Researchers identified a mutation that disrupts a thalamus-prefrontal circuit involved in flexible decision-making. In mice, the defect led animals to persist with outdated choices rather than adapting when contingencies shifted. That sounds technical, but it speaks to a fundamental issue in cognition: perception and belief are not static snapshots, but ongoing revisions. If the circuitry for revision breaks, the brain can become trapped in stale interpretations of the world. The hopeful part of the study is that reactivating the affected circuit restored more normal behavior. It is still early-stage work, but it offers a cleaner mechanistic bridge between genes, circuits, and distorted reality-tracking. (ScienceDaily)

Short Videos May Weaken Memory by Disrupting Retrieval Pathways: Short-form video got a sharper neuroscientific critique this week. In a study covered by PsyPost, participants who watched fragmented short clips performed much worse on later recall than people who watched one continuous ten-minute video. The difference was not minor: the continuous-video group answered about two-thirds of questions correctly, while the short-video group got only about 43 percent right. Brain imaging suggested that rapid context switching interfered with the systems that knit details into coherent memory traces and support cognitively controlled retrieval. In plain terms, short bursts may keep attention moving while giving memory too little continuity to build durable structure. It is one study, not a final verdict on short-form media, but it adds empirical weight to the worry that fragmented viewing habits can degrade how experience gets stored and retrieved. (PsyPost – Psychology News)

A Self-Induced Trance Offers a Rare Window Into Altered Consciousness Without Drugs: An unusual neuroimaging case study documented a woman who could voluntarily and repeatedly enter a trance state with features often associated with psychedelics, hypnosis, and meditation. Across 20 fMRI sessions over five months, she reported vivid imagery, altered embodiment, changes in agency, time distortion, and a sense of unity, while remaining aware that she was in the scanner. Researchers compared her scans with those of matched controls performing vivid imagery tasks. The work is provocative because it isolates altered consciousness from pharmacology and anchors it in repeated laboratory observation rather than anecdote. The reported state showed structured changes in brain dynamics, including lower entropy and greater statistical complexity during the trance. Even as a single-person study, it gives consciousness research something precious: a reproducible, trainable altered state that can be examined under controlled conditions. (PsyPost – Psychology News)

A Multi-Drug Imaging Analysis Maps Shared Psychedelic Brain Effects: A large neuroimaging analysis summarized by Medical Xpress pooled data from 267 participants across 11 datasets and four psychedelic drugs, looking for common signatures across compounds rather than one-off effects. The result was a consistent picture of increased coupling between large-scale cortical networks involved in higher cognition, vision, and movement, along with changes in subcortical systems that coordinate perception and action. The authors argue that psychedelics may relax top-down control, allowing freer communication among networks that are usually more tightly constrained. That interpretation fits the subjective reports often associated with these drugs: loosened boundaries, richer associations, and altered perceptual salience. For cognition reporting, the importance is methodological as much as conceptual. Instead of focusing on one drug, one lab, or one brain region, the study tries to identify a broader organizational principle behind psychedelic states. (Medical Xpress)

AI May Help Scale Psychotherapy Training Without Replacing Therapists: Another notable cognition-and-technology story this week asks a practical question: where can AI actually help in psychotherapy? The answer from a University of Utah team is not “by becoming the therapist,” but by improving training, evaluation, and feedback at scale. The paper argues that large language models may be useful in measuring therapist performance, modeling conversational techniques, and helping supervisors review far more sessions than current human labor allows. That is a subtler claim than the familiar automation hype. It treats psychotherapy as a deeply human practice while still asking where machine assistance can reduce bottlenecks in access and quality control. In that sense, the story sits at the intersection of cognition, language, and social technology: not whether AI has a mind, but how it can interact with one of the most relational forms of human care. (Medical Xpress)

Plants May Be Tracking Events, Not Just Time: This week’s most eccentric cognition-adjacent item is also one of the more conceptually interesting. A report on new work with Mimosa pudica argues that the plants may be able to enumerate recurring light-dark events rather than merely following a fixed circadian rhythm. In repeated experiments, the plants adjusted movement patterns in ways the researchers say are more consistent with tracking event number than simply measuring elapsed time. The claim is not that plants think like animals, but that learning-like information processing may not require neurons at all. If the finding holds up, it pushes at a long-standing boundary in cognition research: the assumption that memory, decision-making, and pattern learning belong only to nervous systems. The study is early and mechanistically unresolved, but it is exactly the kind of result that widens the conceptual horizon of consciousness-and-cognition coverage. (SciTechDaily)

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IMAGE CREDIT: NASA.