The Best of MIT Press

Notes on interstellar hitchhikers and the origins of life.

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

Huxley was a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness, which he actively cultivated in the service of his writing.

An excerpt from the celebrated 19th-century photographer's memoir "When I Was a Photographer."

An excerpt from “Memory,” a primer on human memory, its workings, feats, and flaws, by two leading psychological researchers.

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.

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."

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.»

The quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with surveillance capitalism but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the 19th century.

«Emerging experimental psychology laboratories wanted to create a new kind of human being: quantifiable, calculable, and predictable.»

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

«Strikingly, participants given literature that mentioned headaches as a possible side effect of montelukast experienced headaches more frequently, even if they were taking a placebo.»

An excerpt from veteran game designer Greg Costikyan's book "Uncertainty in Games."

«Unless you have lived in a Skinner box from an ear»

Rhythm plays an important role in how we perceive — and connect with — the world.

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

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.»

When we view objectivity and subjectivity as opposites rather than complements, we distort the empirical realities of data collection.

«This despair helps my students recognize an apparently banal assignment as a real design situation. It teaches them that data is created, not found; and that creating it well demands humanity, rather than objectivity.»