Why your brain sees a cup differently when you're about to grab it

Using fMRI during movie watching, researchers found that the same object activates completely different neural representations depending on context: when you're about to act on something, parietal regions organize it by how you'd grab it; when it's just background, visual cortex organizes it by what it means. Visual features themselves stayed consistent across contexts, suggesting the brain has a flexible filing system that switches organizational logic on the fly.