Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure. New, old, and dead writers offer their advice for stepping up your literary game.   These parallel aspirations are a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your...

“We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million...

I feel completely different person since the last two years. My perspective to the world and humanity shifted and gradually became bottom-up proccess, which I realize lately, and had very good impacts in my life. The stream of informations, cognitive toolkits, and knowledge are easy to be...

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats...

Cancer is a disease of the body’s cells that affects around half of all Australians by the age of 85. Normally cells grow and multiply in a controlled way. But if something causes a mistake to occur in the cells’ genetic blueprints, this control can be lost. There are a number of...

Primates, philosophers, and how subjectivity ensures the absolute truth of our existence.   What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our existence. And yet...

If crystals exist in spatial dimensions, then they ought to exist in the dimension of time too, says Nobel prize-winning physicist   One of the most powerful ideas in modern physics is that the Universe is governed by symmetry. This is the idea that certain properties of a system do not...

The past is another country — but an alternate history is a whole new world. The best alternate histories can make you see the real history of our world in a whole new way, and make you realize that events that seem like they were inevitable… may not have been. But an alternate history...

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you’d describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In...

We’re often blind to the not-so-wonderful traits we possess—but quick to point them out in others   Has someone said you’re acting like a jerk (or worse) in social situations?   Here are 6 reasons why you may have earned this title: 1.  You only talk about yourself....

Michael Gazzaniga, one of the world’s leading researchers in cognitive neuroscience, describes the mystery of free will: “If you think about it this way, if you are a Martian coming by earth and looking at all these humans and then looking at how they work you wouldn’t—it would...

One of the most interesting courses I took as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley was a class on cognitive science from the famed linguist George Lakoff. The course was essentially just us reading through his classic book, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind...

What happens when scientific investigation gives us a conclusion we do not like, for example: prayer does not physically heal anyone (or else makes things worse for the patient being prayed for), homeopathy’s only effect is to pay a charlatan, and “Mother” Earth is finding smarter ways...

Sherlock Holmes’s technique is so elusive not only because it relies on observational mastery that most of us do not possess but in that it also manages to both cast off and exploit one of the most common reasoning fallacies that we are prone to committing: the conjunction fallacy, whereby...

Empathy, a concept originally introduced as Einfühlung by Theodore Lipps, is a state that allows us to share in the experiences and mental states of others. It lets us understand–or at least begin to approximate–their feelings, their internal conditions, their possible thoughts and...

Contextual nature of memory   Our minds respond to cues in our surroundings to retrieve whatever it was that needed retrieving. In other words, we recall information better in the same environment as we stored it–or, in my case, the same environment that triggered the connection–to...

Your daily cup of coffee may be doing more for you than providing that early-morning pick-me-up. The health impact of coffee has long been a controversial topic, with advocates touting its antioxidant activity and brain-boosting ability, and detractors detailing downsides such as insomnia,...

Next supercontinent will form over the Arctic Ocean   Over the next few hundred million years, the Arctic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea will disappear, and Asia will crash into the Americas forming a supercontinent that will stretch across much of the Northern Hemisphere. That’s the...

Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung is on a quest to map brain connections that reveal how our memories and personalities take root.   The human brain has 100 billion neurons, each of which is connected to many others. Neuroscientists believe these connections hold the key to our memories,...

It starts innocently enough, perhaps the first time you recognize your own reflection. You. Yourself. Your very own self.   This was an (admittedly illegal) form of protest against the inescapability of in-your-face marketing in the city I live in. And now that the internet is part of...

Some of the iconic winter landscapes by Pieter Breughel the Elder rank not only as fine examples of 16th century Dutch art. Paintings such as Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow (1565) also serve as vivid evidence for the so-called Little Ice Age, a period of cold climate conditions and glacier...

What’s the Latest Development? Not every idea you have is going to be a winner. That is a rule of the creativity game. Even people hailed as visionaries and geniuses have mediocre output—sometimes it is outright terrible. But new research suggests a trick to identifying your best...

“Most public policy is based on offering people incentives and disincentives,” says psychologist Gregory Berns. “Our findings indicate that it’s unreasonable to think that a policy based on costs-and-benefits analysis will influence people’s behavior when it comes...

Nathan Myhrvold, CEO and Managing Director, Intellectual Ventures; Co-Author (with Bill Gates), The Road Ahead; Author, Modernist Cuisine   Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world...

Andrei Linde, Father of “Eternal Chaotic Inflation”; Professor of Physics, Stanford University   “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.” This is one of the most famous quotes from Albert Einstein. “The fact that it is...

Children today reach puberty earlier and adulthood later. The result: A lot of teenage weirdness. What’s wrong with the teenage mind? How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Why does the girl who knows all about birth...

The world is filled with a variety of sounds. While some noises may produce joy and happiness, others may generate contrasting emotions such as sadness and anger. The impact of sound is powerful and affects multiple areas of everyday life. Noise can even affect one’s health and well-being....

Clouds play a vital role in Earth’s energy balance, cooling or warming Earth’s surface depending on their type   Like many of us, Earth works on a budget – an energy budget. However, this energy isn’t the type that powers our automobiles or electric lights. It’s the...

Hallucinations, Forgotten Faces, and Other Cognitive Quirks   What’s the Big Idea? If seeing is believing, then how do we come to know? One common misperception holds that vision springs directly from the eyes. True, the eyes, ears, and skin bombard us with a constant stream of...

There is something to be said for letting go of the mantle of expert, argues Peter Fiske.   In science, intellect and intelligence are valued above all else. Scientists spend years in graduate programmes, studying, teaching and researching, to become experts in their fields. Having...

Radical Theory Explains the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life, Challenges Conventional Wisdom   The earth is alive, asserts a revolutionary scientific theory of life emerging from Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. The trans-disciplinary theory demonstrates that...

Psychologists are learning that the brain stays agile well into middle age, retaining the ability to learn new skill sets and take on different points of view by building new neural connections. And nothing is more important to maintaining a healthy brain than receiving an education, say...

At 13, an age when most boys want to learn the guitar, Gary Marcus, decided he wanted to be a scientist. Twenty-five years later he had become one of the country’s best known cognitive psychologists, with major papers and three general-interest books on the workings of the human mind and a...

What five-year-old Albert Einstein can teach us about serendipity and the filter bubble of information.   A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty...

MIT neuroscientists explore how longstanding conflict influences empathy for others   MIT postdoc Emile Bruneau has long been drawn to conflict — not as a participant, but an observer. In 1994, while doing volunteer work in South Africa, he witnessed firsthand the turmoil surrounding...

We all learn at least one language as children. But what does it take to learn six languages, twenty . . . seventy? Such feats of linguistic prowess provide a glimpse into what the human brain is capable of–and hold up a mirror to our desire to live without language barriers on a...

Andrew Newberg, director of research at the Myrna Brind Center of Integrative Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia, responds: Researchers have pinpointed differences between the brains of believers and nonbelievers, but the neural picture is not yet...

“Bloggers are famous enough to have stalkers, but not famous enough to have bodyguards.” —Danny O’Brien Everyone thinks they want a million Twitter followers and a million pageviews a day on their blog and the incredible high that it must be to walk around in the world...

Why is there something rather than nothing? That’s the question cosmologist Lawrence Krauss tackles in his new book, A Universe from Nothing. In it, he surveys the discoveries that have led to scientists’ current understanding of the universe, and explores what the future of the...

You might someday be much, much smarter than you are now. That’s the hope of neuroscientists focused on understanding the basis of intelligence. They have discovered that the brains of people with high IQs tend to be highly integrated, with neural paths connecting distant brain regions,...

Tackling a crossword can crowd the tip of your tongue. You know that you know the answers to 3 Down and 5 Across, but the words just won’t come out. Then, when you’ve given up and moved on to another clue, comes blessed relief. The elusive answer suddenly occurs to you, crystal clear.The...

Many of us subscribe to false beliefs about how our memories work, sometimes with serious consequences   As a lifelong user of human memory, you probably feel you’ve got a good idea of how it works, right? To test your understanding of memory, we compare several commonplace...

Using eye-tracking technology, scientists are discovering clues to how we think and learn   As you read these words, try paying attention to something you usually never notice: the movements of your eyes. While you scan these lines of text, or glance at that ad over there or look up from...