Welcome to Neural Flows

A newsletter inspired by the book Brain Flows

For the past few years, this newsletter existed under the name Practically Scientific. It was a place where I explored bias, scientific reasoning, AI, and social progress – topics I care about deeply. But it didn’t properly reflect my lifelong passion for seeking to understand the human mind and brain.

I’m relaunching this newsletter today as Neural Flows, and I want to tell you why.

What changed

I’ve spent the last several years writing a book. It’s called Brain Flows: How Network Dynamics Compose the Human Mind, and it’s coming out from Princeton University Press in November 2026. I literally took the time I was devoting to this newsletter (and then some) to write the book. The book lays out a theory I’ve been developing across two decades of research: that the mind – your thoughts, perceptions, feelings, decisions, everything that makes you you – arises from patterns of activity flowing through brain networks.

Not static wiring diagrams. Not activity in individual brain regions or even collections of regions. Flows. Dynamic, compositional, constantly improvised movements of neural activity that compose and recompose themselves moment by moment. The brain, in this view, is less like a computer executing a program and more like a jazz ensemble constantly improvising.

Writing this book forced me to think carefully about questions I’d been circling for years: What is consciousness, and how can network dynamics explain it? Do we actually have free will, or is that an illusion? What makes human intelligence different from artificial intelligence, and what doesn’t? Why do some brains fall into patterns we call mental disorders, and what does that tell us about what “healthy” brain flow patterns look like? What happens in the brain when you have a genuinely creative idea?

After writing the book I realized these are the questions I want this newsletter to be about.

What Neural Flows will be

This is a newsletter where I think in public about the questions that drive my research, and the bigger questions those lead to.

Some posts will be deep dives into how the brain works at the network level. Not surface descriptions, but mechanisms – activity flow modeling, compositional neural representations, frontoparietal network dynamics – explained in a way that’s accessible without being dumbed down. If you’re a neuroscientist, I hope you’ll find the theoretical framing provocative. If you’re not, I hope you’ll come away understanding something genuinely new about the wet mesh of networked matter running your life.

Some posts will be explorations of big questions – consciousness, intelligence, free will, mental health, creativity – from the perspective of someone who builds models of brain network dynamics for a living. I have opinions on these topics, but I also have uncertainties, and I’ll be honest about both.

Some posts will sit at the intersection of neuroscience and AI. I study biological neural networks. The tech world builds artificial ones. The analogies between these are sometimes illuminating and sometimes deeply misleading, and I think a working neuroscientist’s perspective is useful for sorting out which is which.

And some posts will be dispatches from the process of science itself – what it’s like to develop and test a theory, what I’m reading, what’s exciting or troubling in the field, and where I think the whole enterprise of understanding the brain is headed.

What I’m asking of you

If you’ve been subscribed since the Practically Scientific days, thank you for sticking around through the long silence. I owe you some good writing, and I intend to deliver.

If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Michael W. Cole, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Rutgers University, where I run the Cole Neurocognition Lab. I’ve published extensively on brain network organization, cognitive control, and activity flow modeling; but this newsletter isn’t my CV. It’s where I try to connect the science I do to the questions that keep me up at night, and that I suspect keep you up too.

Here’s what I’d ask: if something I write makes you think, share it with someone who’d find it interesting. The best newsletters grow because readers trust them enough to recommend them. And leave comments – I read all of them, and the best ideas often come from the conversation, not the post.

The enigma of how brains generate minds is too big for any one person. Let’s explore it together.