The Best of MIT Press
10+ most popular MIT Press articles, as voted by our community.
Committed to the daily re-imagining of what a university press can be since 1962. | RTs ≠ endorsements
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Dots Out of Line: On Neuroatypical Curiosity
Educators should ask not who is curious, but how is each person curious?
MIT Press on Apathy
What Nihilism Is Not
In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.
MIT Press on Brain
Finding Language in the Brain
Psycholinguist Giosuè Baggio sheds light on the thrilling, evolving field of neurolinguistics, where neuroscience and linguistics meet.
MIT Press on Consciousness
How Did Consciousness Evolve? An Illustrated Guide
Two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science explore the subject through words and images.
MIT Press on Environment
An Environmentalist’s Lessons for an Improvisational Life
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»
MIT Press on Health
How Expectations and Conditioning Shape Our Response to Placebos
Kathryn Hall, an expert on placebos, considers the ways that expectations and learning affect our response to them.
What Bird Longevity Might Teach Us About Human Health
Birds have an exceptional resistance to aging. Can scientists discover their secrets?
MIT Press on History
What 250 Years of Innovation History Reveals About Our Green Future
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.»
MIT Press on Meditation
On Meditation and the Unconscious: A Buddhist Monk and a Neuroscientist in Conversation
An excerpt from "Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience."
MIT Press on Philosophy
Philosophy for Passengers: Reflections On ‘Passenger Time’
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.»
A Philosopher's Case Against Death
The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture; it's time to overthrow that idea.
MIT Press on Poetry
Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?
Cognitive psychologist and poet Keith Holyoak explores whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity.
Popular
These are some all-time favorites with Refind users.
Running and the Science of Mental Toughness
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.»
The Powerful Role of Magical Beliefs in Our Everyday Thinking
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.»
What Popular Culture Is Telling Us About Parenting
Modern novels, films, and television shows are a sobering reflection of society’s vastly different expectations for moms and dads.
Who’s Afraid of Driverless Cars?
Adopting autonomous vehicles is a question of psychology as much as of technology.
The Brilliant Objects Embodying the Meeting of Disability and Design
In praise of truly interdisciplinary thinking.
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