Saturday Quote: Is the Universe a computational process? Plus: The Psychological Benefits of the Game

This week, researchers uncovered the negative pressure mechanisms plants use to transmit stress. Linguists have discovered that the melody of the English speech language functions as a distinct language of its own. There was also some depressing news! Just as the Trump administration has cut NASA’s budget significantly, it could potentially discard James Webb’s space telescope at the beginning of its operational period (they are also pushing to discard the Nancy Gray Sloman space telescope, which was completed before its launch).

Furthermore, researchers have found that video game Dark Souls has a positive psychological impact on players. Physicists have made a new contribution to the theory that the universe is a computational process. Spanish scientists mapped brain connection patterns in psychotic patients.

Games, like life, difficult

Researchers at Aalto University have discovered that Dark Souls, a well-known dark fantasy action game by the Japanese developers of Software, has a positive impact on players’ mental health. Set in the fictional world of Lord Run, the player’s characters engage in extremely difficult melee battles with armored knights, mythical beasts, and supernatural figures, gathering souls that act as experience points and are primarily used to level the statistics of the player’s characters. Unaccumulated souls are lost when the character dies, but can be recovered once the player returns to where he died.

Researchers conducted a detailed thematic analysis of player discussions on Reddit, focusing on personal stories related to mental health. Many players have expressed that the structure of the Dark Souls game helped them to accept failure as part of the process of life.

Researcher Jaakko Väkevä said, “Dark Souls seemed to empower many players to stand up to the real-life struggles of patience and hope through its ruthless difficulties and powerful narrative themes.” Researchers emphasize that while games are not an alternative to therapeutic approaches, thoughtful game structures can have a positive impact on mental health.

C:\Universe\System32

Information theory was formulated in the 1940s and deals with information quantification and storage and its communication. The principles of entropy physics are fundamental concepts of information theory, and over the decades it has been found that the lessons of information theory have been applied to neurobiology, molecular dynamics and theoretical physics, including the properties of black holes. Theories have become so extensive as physicists explored whether the universe itself constitutes a large-scale computational process.

Physicists at the University of Portsmouth have presented findings suggesting that gravity is the result of computational processes within the universe. His paper proposes that gravity can be a process of organizing matter in the universe. It can bring together the matter and objects of the universe and keep the information of the universe in order.

Author Melvin Vopson said, “Simply put, tracking and calculating the position and momentum of a single object in space is much more computationally effective than many objects. Therefore, gravity attraction appears to be just another optimization mechanism for the computational process that has the role of compressing information.”

Neural connection patterns of psychosis

Researchers from Barcelona, ​​Spain conducted research into brain connections and reported which neural mechanisms allow psychosis to send money to patients. Mental illness is a serious mental health disorder and it is difficult to distinguish between things that are not real. The symptoms include delusions and hallucinations, which can lead to sleep problems and social withdrawal.

In this study, the researchers compared the neural connectivity patterns of patients recovering from psychosis with those of patients who did not. This group included 88 patients and 128 healthy individuals in the early stages of psychosis. They used computational models to identify differences in neural connectivity and to identify patterns that promote remission in psychosis. They found that brain network connectivity was reduced in patients with persistent symptoms of psychosis. In patients recovering, there was an increase.

The difference in connectivity was profound. Researchers describe them as almost opposites to each other. Both recovered and psychotic patients had less overall stability in neuronal connections than healthy patients. However, among recovering patients, increased connectivity contributed widely to remission.

The researchers believe the findings can contribute to predicting patient outcomes and evaluating individual treatments, including pharmacological and electromagnetic treatments.

©2025 Science X Network