Understanding how the brain works requires a delicate balance between the appreciation of the importance of a multitude of biological details and the ability to see beyond those details to general principles. As technological innovations vastly increase the amount of data we collect, the importance of intuition into how to analyze and treat these data may, paradoxically, become more important.

When distracters conflict with our instructions, our reactions normally get slower. However, Coulthard and colleagues in this issue of Neuron show that damage to the right parietal lobe reverses this effect, paradoxically facilitating responses. This surprising result may shed light on the functional role of parietal cortex within a larger cortical circuit for voluntary behavior.

Capping proteins limit actin filament growth, but paradoxically increase actin-based cell motility. This has been attributed to funneling of actin monomers to the filament ends that remain uncapped. Using a reconstituted motility system, Akin and Mullins (2008) now demonstrate that filament capping increases Arp2/3-based nucleation and branching, rather than elevating the rate of filament elong...

That viewpoint takes us to the deterministic idea of interaction: cause A (a mutated gene) interacts with cause B (amino acid intake) to bring about the effect C (mental retardation). Paradoxically perhaps, the word interaction also found home in frequentist statistics (interaction models), even though frequentist statistics is founded on chance-type probabilities, which resonate with indetermi...

In a clinical case of 2:1 sinoatrial block, carotid massage, paradoxically, released the sinoatrial block and doubled the manifest sinus rate. This resulted from a deceleration of the sinus discharge rate which allowed consecutive sinus impulses to traverse the sinoatrial junction.

In this issue of JEM, Sulciner et al. (https://doi.org/10.1084/jem.20170681) provide evidence that therapy-induced cancer cell death can, paradoxically, stimulate and accelerate the growth of surviving malignant cells by fueling tumor-promoting inflammation. Resolvins, a class of lipid mediators, counteract this effect, representing an attractive target for therapeutic intervention.

Fibrous nanosilica (KCC-1) oxynitrides are promising solid-base catalysts. Paradoxically, when their nitrogen content increases, their catalytic activity decreases. This counterintuitive observation is explained here for the first time using (15) N-solid-state NMR spectroscopy enhanced by dynamic nuclear polarization.

When a striped disk moves across a flickering background, the stripes paradoxically seem to move faster than the disk itself. We attribute this new illusion to reverse-phi motion, which slows down the disk rim but does not affect the stripes.