The Best of MIT Press

Educators should ask not who is curious, but how is each person curious?

In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

Psycholinguist Giosuè Baggio sheds light on the thrilling, evolving field of neurolinguistics, where neuroscience and linguistics meet.

Two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science explore the subject through words and images.

Improvisation is the essence of environmental learning, sparking the imagination, stimulating creativity, and helping us reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth.

«watching the breeze gently ruffle the patches of open water»

Kathryn Hall, an expert on placebos, considers the ways that expectations and learning affect our response to them.

Birds have an exceptional resistance to aging. Can scientists discover their secrets?

If history is any indication, an unstoppable wave of competitive innovations is heading our way again.

«As do our jobs. Our answers to that old question “What do you do?” change: “I design webpages and facilitate SoMe.” That would be social media, by the way. In 1995, both the job itself and the answer would be utter gibberish. With each technical wave also come new social discourses.»

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An excerpt from "Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience."

We are, all of us, time’s passengers, witnesses to its passing, which is also our own.

«The time of our lives passes between two black boxes, two Xs, two vanishing poles: unrepresentable, unreachable.»

The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture; it's time to overthrow that idea.

Cognitive psychologist and poet Keith Holyoak explores whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity.

There is more to running than just training your muscles and improving your stamina. It is also a mental sport, and maybe even more so than previously believed.

«In his opinion, what runners refer to as exhaustion has nothing to do with their physical ability to carry on or not. It is simply a matter of deciding to give up.»

New research on magical thinking challenges many traditional views of cognition.

«Control is an important coping strategy, and a lack of control can lead to mental health issues such as anxiety and depression.»

Modern novels, films, and television shows are a sobering reflection of society’s vastly different expectations for moms and dads.

Adopting autonomous vehicles is a question of psychology as much as of technology.

In praise of truly interdisciplinary thinking.