Adults are often thought to be less creative than children, as we swap painting for presentations and sandpits for spreadsheets. But in a new study, children actually performed worse on creativity tests than adults – yet made up for it in confidence.

“We found that adults are actually more creative thinkers,” says at the University of Graz in Austria. “But children enjoy creativity more and are much less worried about what others think about their ideas.”

There is a popular belief that children are more creative than adults, he says, which may come from children having more time and opportunities to engage in creative activities. Yet prior research suggests that .

These studies were often based on a single task, like imagining alternative uses for everyday objects, says Benedek. Taking a broader approach, he and his colleagues recruited 92 children (aged between 4 and 7) and 70 adults (aged 25, on average) to carry out three creative tasks.

First, they had to come up with as many alternative uses for a tin can as possible within 3 minutes. Then, they drew freely for 8 minutes, and in the final task, they had 8 minutes to draw an animal that doesn’t exist.

Five people who weren’t involved in the research were then trained to objectively judge creativity based on originality and whether the final result fulfilled the brief of the task.

In the first task, the adults scored 3.9 points, on average, out of 5, while the children scored 2.9 points. One of the adults imagined a tin can could be used as a “Halloween candy box when on (a) diet”, whereas some children imagined it as a rattle.

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In the second and third tasks, the adults scored 0.6 and 1.9 points higher, respectively, than the children.

The findings underscore how creativity draws on combining ideas from prior experience, says at King’s College London. For instance, adults are probably aware of more animals than children, so have a greater variety of creatures to draw from when producing a fantasy animal.

After completing the tasks, the participants were asked questions like “How well do you think you performed the task?”, “How much were you worried/anxious to not perform well on the task?” and “How much fun was the task?”.

The researchers found that the children were substantially more confident in what they produced, scoring their performances 4.8 and 4.6 points for the free drawing and animal tasks, respectively, compared with the adults’ 2.8 and 3.3 scoring.

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The children also reported lower anxiety compared with the adults. “If the purpose of creativity is to have enjoyment in it, to play and to be unfettered humans, then children are doing better at that,” says Ross.

But the two groups got a similar level of pleasure from the animal-drawing task. Adults may have liked that task’s specific instruction, which may have meant they worried less about being judged for their idea, says Benedek.

Regardless of the quality of the end result, people should try to be more creative for their wellbeing, says Ross. Engaging with the arts has been linked to reduced mental health problems and greater social skills. “Creativity, especially when done with other people, is really beneficial to your mental wellbeing – and you don’t have to score 5 out of 5 on a ranking scale,” she says.

Our brain may be a hybrid of two ancient nervous systems that were packaged together hundreds of millions of years ago. This is based on the finding that the front and back brain regions in people and several other species develop from two distinct cell types in embryos, instead of sharing the same developmental origin, as previously thought.

“Our research suggests that evolution took two existing neural systems and pushed them together spatially,” says at Stanford University in California. “Having the brain as one organ would probably be more efficient, but we rely on this primordial way to make the brain as two separate pieces.”

Loh and his colleagues studied early stages of mouse embryo development and found its brain develops from two types of early progenitor cells, proliferative cells with a limited capacity of self-renewal. One type expresses a gene called OTX2 and turns into the neurons found in the front part of the brain, comprising the forebrain and midbrain. The other expresses a gene called GBX2 and becomes the neurons in the back part of the brain, the hindbrain.

The researchers then conducted experiments using human cells in a dish and found that the neurons of the hindbrain and those of the forebrain and midbrain also develop from different progenitor cells. “We’ve shown for the first time that the front of the brain arises from a totally different progenitor cell than the back of the brain,” says Loh.

This explains why it has been so hard to grow human hindbrain tissue in a lab. “It was actually a summer student’s failed experiment that got us into this,” says Loh. Researchers have typically tried making hindbrain neurons from the progenitor cells that are destined to become forebrain and midbrain neurons, which doesn’t work, he says.

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Armed with this knowledge, the team was able to grow functional human hindbrain motor neurons in a dish for the first time by starting with the correct type of progenitor cell.  

The hindbrain coordinates fundamental, life-sustaining processes, such as breathing, sleeping, eating and the beating of the heart, whereas the forebrain is the centre of higher-level thought. Conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common type of motor neuron disease, and spinal muscular atrophy cause speech and swallowing difficulties because they affect the hindbrain. Recently, scientists also discovered that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy suppress appetite in mice by .

Now that it is easier to grow human hindbrain neurons in a dish, it should assist ALS and spinal muscular atrophy research, and allow us to investigate the precise mechanisms of how GLP-1 drugs work in people, says Loh.

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The researchers also studied early-stage embryos of chickens, zebrafish and acorn worms, and found their nervous systems are similarly derived from two different types of progenitor cells. This suggests our shared two-origin brain system arose at least 550 million years ago.

But jellyfish, which we diverged from around 600 to 700 million years ago, have two separate nervous systems. These may have joined up in our distant ancestors because it improved their overall processing power, says Loh. “You get more efficient communication when things are closer together,” he says.

Having our brains develop along two separate pathways might also have facilitated the evolution of complex thought, says Loh. While the hindbrain was taking care of all the basic functions for keeping us alive, “evolution could play around with the forebrain, and make mistakes and give rise to all the fancy things like memory and creativity”, he says.

Human brain organoids have been implanted into mice that are missing half their brain. Tiny versions of the human cerebral cortex – a region involved in memory, movement and thinking – were put into mice that lacked this major brain region. Not only did the organoids integrate into the mice’s brains, but they also restored most of their cognition.

“The mouse is [relatively] sick without a cortex, then you transplant these organoids in, and it behaves more like the normal mouse,” says at the University of Cambridge, who wasn’t involved in the research.

at Stanford University in California and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to lack more than 90 per cent of their cortex, or about half their brain. These mice experience only some memory and movement deficits, since their brain adapts to compensate for their missing cortex, says Pașca.

In about half of these mice, the team surgically implanted four human brain organoids, generated by bathing human stem cells in chemicals for about 40 days. These filled the cavity in each mouse’s skull, producing what the researchers called XCX mice. The remaining mice, apallial mice, didn’t receive the transplants.

A few months later, the apallial mice performed worse in a memory test, where they had to navigate a maze, than a third group of normal mice with intact brains. But this deficit was almost completely reversed in the XCX mice. The XCX mice also had a gait between that of the apallial and normal mice.

Scans revealed that the organoids had grown to form cortex-like grafts. “Half the volume of the brain is [initially] gone, and now largely 90 per cent of that missing volume is covered by human cells,” said Pașca.

This builds on prior studies that have implanted human brain organoids into rat or mouse brains, but without such a large part of the rodent brain being missing initially, says Pașca. These studies showed only that such organoids can alter cognition, rather than improving it, he says. For instance, in one study, light stimulated human brain organoids in rats to make them anticipate water.

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The grafts in the latest study were also the first to contain a kind of nerve cell, called von Economo neurons, that influences social skills, as well as neurons that extended from the cortex to the spinal cord. The latter could explain why these grafts reduced impairments in motor skills, says Balmuș.

The team’s organoids were larger and more akin to the human cerebral cortex than those used in previous experiments, says Pașca. But according to at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Austria, they still lack the proper arrangement and structure of the cortex. “It’s a bit of a mishmash of neurons” and other cells, he says. “Most of the cell types are there, but they’re not separated into regions like in a normal cortex.”

In another experiment, the team showed that human organoid transplants made mice respond to hypoxia, or low oxygen levels, in a way similar to people. Mice have evolved to be highly resilient to low oxygen levels, due to living underground, so it is hard to replicate this in a normal mouse, says Balmuș. This suggests that these experimental animals could provide a better way to study cerebral palsy, a condition that causes movement problems and can be caused by hypoxia around birth, says Balmuș.

But such experiments come with ethical concerns, says Knoblich. These mice “deserve the same kind of protection that we ascribe to any animal experiment, meaning that we need to make absolutely sure that there’s no sensation of pain, that there is no unnecessary suffering, and that the risk of the experiment is matched to the medical gain,” he says. The latest study achieved this, he says.

A common concern is whether mice with human brain organoids will gain a human-like level of consciousness. “The data so far doesn’t say that putting [a human organoid] in makes the mouse smarter or more conscious than a normal mouse,” says Knoblich. “It’s similar to taking a wheel from a car and putting it on a tree and saying that’s a car.”

Whether it is a novel by Charles Dickens or Jackie Collins, reading for pleasure is good for brain health. Regularly enjoying a good book has been linked to improved memory, empathy and mental health, among other benefits. This may be through its effect on brain structure or by building cognitive reserve. 

“Reading is like a cognitive workout,” says at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, who wasn’t involved in the research. But reading for pleasure has plummeted over the past 20 years, which may partly be due to us spending more time on social media. 

In the latest research, at the University of Cambridge and her colleagues pooled evidence on the effects of reading for pleasure from five surveys and eight long-term studies, with tens of thousands of participants among them. 

Many of these linked reading to greater volume of grey matter – part of the brain that supports thinking and memory – and stronger communication between brain regions. This may be how reading builds cognitive reserve, says Sahakian. This is the brain’s ability to defend against ageing and adapt to damage, which is heavily shaped by our lifestyle.

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Reading was also repeatedly linked to improved mental health. One study found that children who began reading for pleasure early in life had moderately larger brain surface areas and volumes in regions linked to emotional control. This feels particularly important amid evidence that youth mental health is worse today than it was decades ago, says Sahakian.

Overall, the team linked reading for pleasure to reduced stress, greater empathy, enhanced wellbeing and reduced loneliness. In childhood specifically, reading was associated with better attention, memory, executive function, academic achievement and fewer mental health problems. Among older adults, it was linked to a lower risk of cognitive decline.

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Reading fiction may be particularly important by exposing us to narratives that allow our brain to practice how we might respond to life events, improving its predication abilities. It may also make us feel connected to the characters, reducing feelings of loneliness. 

Non-fiction may stimulate different parts of the brain, says Sahakian. But what is important is that you “read for enjoyment, as you will read more often and longer”, she says.

A brain implant has enabled people with paralysis to speak while gesturing, such as nodding or waving. These sorts of exchanges, done via an avatar, could help them communicate with more nuance.

“In our everyday life, gestures play an important role in communication,” says at the University of California, San Francisco. “Saying ‘maybe’ and nodding your head has a very different connotation than if you shake your head.”

Experimental brain implants have boosted the ability to either speak or move among people with paralysis, but simultaneously haven’t been very successful. To achieve this, implants need to cover a large part of the sensorimotor cortex, a brain region involved in speech and movement, says Brosler.

Now, Brosler and her colleagues have tested an iPhone-sized implant in this part of the brain in two people with paralysis. The first participant, who the researchers call Bravo-1r, became paralysed after a stroke, while the second, Bravo-6, had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, the most common form of motor neuron disease.

Both participants had lost almost all movement in their limbs. They also couldn’t speak and could only make unintelligible sounds.

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First, the team recorded the participants’ brain activity while they repeatedly attempted to say 10 phrases – such as “hello”, “nice to meet you” and “how’s it going?” – or perform 10 gestures, like waving, clapping and shaking their head. In some cases, the participants attempted to do these separately, while in others they tried both simultaneously.

The team then used each of the participants’ brain recordings to train customised machine learning models to predict their intended phrases and gestures.

To put the models to the test, the participants attempted to repeat various pairs of phrases and gestures that were displayed on a screen. The models interpreted their brain activity and used that to control the movement of an avatar resembling the participants, while the speech predictions flashed up on the screen. 

The team chose to use avatars, rather than attempting for the individuals themselves to speak and gesture, because this offered a relatively simple way to prove that both actions could be simultaneously decoded from brain activity, says Brosler.

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Bravo-1r’s intended gestures and speech were predicted with 88 and 84 per cent accuracy, respectively, while Bravo-6’s were predicted with 66 and 70 per cent accuracy. “If those models were operating on complete chance, the accuracy would be like 9 per cent,” says Brosler. “It was really exciting.”

“It’s a very nice piece of work, with robust results,” says at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. But it’s based on a very limited set of phrases and gestures, and these still need improving, he says. “For daily use without frustration, there needs to be higher accuracy.”

Brosler says the team is working to address this by further training the models and tweaking the algorithms. She also says that future models could move a person’s own body – if their joints and muscles are in a good enough condition – and produce a synthetic voice, rather than having to do this via an avatar.