From within the dark confines of the skull, the brain builds its own version of reality. By weaving together expectations and information gleaned from the senses, the brain creates a story about the ...

First articulated in the 18th century by a hobbyist-mathematician seeking to reason backward from effects to cause, Bayes’ theorem spent the better part of two centuries struggling for recognition and ...

Bayesian reasoning provides a principled framework for updating beliefs based on new evidence, playing a pivotal role in understanding human cognitive processes. This framework illuminates how ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American I’m not sure when I first heard of Bayes’ ...

Robert Matthews talks of the connection between belief and Bayes’s theorem (13 March, p 38). He seems to think that, because you have to start with some arbitrary level of belief in order for Bayesian ...

I am prompted to write this vignette after viewing an entertaining and faithful adaptation of Lauren Slater’s non-fiction 2004 book, “Opening Skinner’s box”. She described with some detail her attempt ...

Whether in everyday life or in the lab, we often want to make inferences about hypotheses. Whether I’m deciding it’s safe to run a yellow light, when I need to leave home in order to make it to my ...