Collective cognition is often mentioned as one of the advantages of group living. But which factors actually facilitate group smarts? To answer this, we compared how individuals and groups of either ants or people tackle an identical ...Biological ensembles use collective intelligence to tackle challenges together, but suboptimal coordination can undermine the effectiveness of group cognition. Testing whether collective cognition exceeds that of the individual is often impractical since ...

Emotions coordinate our behavior and physiological states during survival-salient events and pleasurable interactions. Even though we are often consciously aware of our current emotional state, such as anger or happiness, the mechanisms giving ...Emotions are often felt in the body, and somatosensory feedback has been proposed to trigger conscious emotional experiences. Here we reveal maps of bodily sensations associated with different emotions using a unique topographical self-report method. In ...

Few recent advances in human medicine have been as influential as the finding that an imbalance (dysbiosis) of our resident microbial communities in the colon is linked to many chronic human illnesses. However, translating advances in ...The gut microbiota plays a role in many human diseases, but high-throughput sequence analysis does not provide a straightforward path for defining healthy microbial communities. Therefore, understanding mechanisms that drive compositional changes during ...