History is made from ideas — but are ideas becoming history?
Out of Our Minds: A History of What We Think and How We Think by Felipe Fernández-Armesto reviewed. For centuries, the imagination has held sway
How our brain sculpts experience in line with our expectations
Our brains predict the outcomes of our actions, shaping reality into what we expect. That’s why we see what we believe
We know a lot less than we think about the world
From 30,000 feet, Britain’s coastline has a familiar sweep and shape. Zoom closer in – to, say, the cliffs of Dover – and it becomes less easy to comprehend. All you can see is a confusing series of…
The interoceptive turn is maturing as a rich science of selfhood
The science of how we sense ourselves from within, including our bodily states, is creating a radical picture of selfhood
To Be More Creative, Cheer Up
I pour a cup of coffee, sharpen my pencil, and get ready to create. I’ve dusted off a half-conceived novel outline I abandoned three…
It’s a Thin Line Between Magical Thinking and Mental Illness
The magic — and the danger — of looking for patterns in the world
The Birth, Death, and Rebirth of Postmodernism
No other idea from the humanities had so vast, if murky, an influence.
Ketamine trips are uncannily like near-death experiences
A light at the end of a tunnel, an out-of-body sensation: how ketamine trips are like near-death experiences
How Social Media Imperils Scholarship
It plays on our vanity to reduce research to a popularity contest.
[REPOST] Epistemic Learned Helplessness
[This is a slightly edited repost of an essay from my old LiveJournal] A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid a…
Knowledge is a stone-age concept, we’re better off without it
Far from being a touchstone of the truth, knowledge is a stone-age concept that harms our dealings with the modern world
He ate the albatross soup, then shot himself: why? A trippy animation…
A man gets off a boat, walks into a restaurant, orders albatross soup, takes one bite, and pulls out a gun and kills himself. Why did he do it? The classic riddle (from the family of lateral thinking…