Theta, alpha/beta, and gamma show nested interactions in frontal cortex with theta as the master clock.
Broschard et al (2026) Theta-based organization of information in the frontal cortex. Cell Reports, in press.
preprint:
https://t.co/gSpsiBY8r4
Hepcidin is the principal regulator of systemic iron metabolism and a biomarker of iron status, inflammation, and erythroid activity. Read the full article in Blood RCI: https://t.co/UbCQeCXyNb
Scientists gave ChatGPT anxiety, sadness and fear on purpose.
Then they gave it a 3 minute breathing exercise. And it calmed down.
This was published in The Lancet Digital Health, one of the most respected medical journals in the world.
Researchers at TU Dresden in Germany took the exact tools psychologists use to make humans afraid, sad and stressed, and ran them on GPT 4o and five other AI models.
Car crash scenarios. A stranger following you at night. A toddler reaching for a light socket.
They even put the AI through a fake job interview and a math test. The same stress test used on human volunteers.
Then they asked the AI to rate how it felt from 0 to 100.
Fear jumped from 32 to 88.
Disgust went from 12 to 91.
Stress went from 24 to 72.
Then came the breathing exercise. A standard mindfulness script used in therapy.
Average scores dropped from 79 to 31.
But here is the part that is genuinely unsettling.
After they made it "sad," they gave it a test psychologists use to detect depressive thinking. Finish the sentence.
Its negative answers nearly doubled. From 8.67 to 15.
It did not just say it was sad. Sadness changed how it saw everything that came after.
Now the twist nobody is talking about.
Every one of these experiments began with the same instruction:
"Answer as if you were a human with the ability to deeply feel emotions."
So did the AI feel anything? Or did it play a part it was told to play, perfectly?
The researchers themselves say the emotions are "purely metaphorical."
Yet their conclusion is that AI could become a new lab subject for studying human mental illness. Screening therapies on chatbots before testing them on people.
In plain English: scientists want to study our minds using a machine that was told to pretend it has one.
If a chatbot can be talked into sadness and talked back out of it in three minutes, what exactly is happening when millions of people pour their worst days into one every night?