Uncertainty about the future has a way of taking over the mind and making it difficult to think about anything else. How it does this is poorly understood. Now, new research described here has revealed a suite of changes that take place in the unsure brain: from the shifts in the activity of individual cells to signals sent across the brain. Published in Communications Biology, the work comes from the laboratory of Jacqueline Gottlieb, PhD, principal investigator at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute.