The Best Articles in Brain
The most useful articles and videos in Brain from around the web—beginners to advanced—curated by thought leaders and our community. We focus on timeless pieces and update the list whenever we discover new, must-read articles or videos—make sure to bookmark and revisit this page.
Top 5 Brain Articles
At a glance: these are the articles that have been most read, shared, and saved in Brain by Refind users in 2023 so far.
Videos
Watch a video to get a quick overview.
Mindfulness isn’t the only powerful mental state
This interview is an episode from The Well, our new publication about ideas that inspire a life well-lived, created with the John Templeton Foundation.Subscr...
The Boltzmann brain paradox
How do you know you’re a person who has lived your life, rather than a just-formed brain full of artificial memories, momentarily hallucinating a reality that doesn’t actually exist? That may sound absurd, but it’s kept several generations of top cosmologists up at night. They call it: the Boltzmann brain paradox. Fabio Pacucci explores this mind-numbing thought experiment.
Inside Magnus Carlsen's mind: How he visualizes the chess board
Lex Fridman Podcast full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZO28NtkwwQPlease support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:- Shopify: https://shop...
Don’t have 10,000 hours to learn something new? That’s fine — all you need is 20
Writer Josh Kaufman shares his own tried-and-tested technique to learn a new skill by putting in just 45 minutes a day for a month. We all have them — the lovelorn musical instruments, the dusty sp…
Christina Costa: How gratitude rewires your brain
When a psychologist who studies well-being ends up with a brain tumor, what happens when she puts her own research into practice? Christina Costa goes beyond the "fight" narrative of cancer -- or any…
What is ...?
New to Brain? These articles make an excellent introduction.
What is neurodiversity?
People think, learn, behave, and experience the world around them in many different ways. Neurodiversity refers to those variations in neurocognitive functioning.
What is neurodiversity?
The term neurodiversity conveys the idea that there is no single right way of thinking, learning, or behaving, and is often used in the context of autism spectrum disorder. A growing self-ad...
What Is the Dissociative Mind?
When we face overwhelming stress, disconnecting can be a coping skill.
How to ...?
How to maintain a healthy brain
Adopt these lifestyle changes and you will not only sharpen your mind today but also reduce your risk of dementia later on
«Train your body Just as mental health and brain health are deeply entwined, so too are your overall physical health and your brain health»
How to Think: The Skill You've Never Been Taught
No skill is more valuable than the ability to think. But how can we learn to think better? How can we avoid thinking poorly. Let's explore.
«Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful.»
How To Learn Stuff Quickly
As software developers, we're always learning new things; it's practically the whole gig! If we can learn to quickly pick up new languages/frameworks/tools, we'll become so much more effective at our…
«I have a terrible memory. This can be a bit problematic; it's hard to learn stuff if you can't remember things! Fortunately, I have a system: spaced repetition.»
How to Stop Overthinking and Start Trusting Your Gut
Five strategies to strengthen your sixth sense.
«When you approach a decision intuitively, your brain works in tandem with your gut to quickly assess all your memories, past learnings, personal needs, and preferences and then makes the wisest decision given the context. In this way, intuition is a form of emotional and experiential data that leaders need to value.»
How To Learn Faster And Smarter (Your Complete Guide)
If you stop learning, you'll stop progressing in life. It's never too late to learn how to learn, and this ultimate guide will show you how to learn faster.
Trending
These links are currently making the rounds in Brain on Refind.
How to Survive a Car Crash in 10 Easy Steps
A journalist navigates a world forever changed by her traumatic brain injury.
Why the Brain’s Connections to the Body Are Crisscrossed
In all bilaterally symmetrical animals, from humans down to simple worms, nerves cross from one side of the body to the opposite side of the brain. Geometry may explain why.
Detailed image of the human retina
Typically, researchers use fluorescence microscopy to highlight three proteins in a tissue, each with a different fluorescent dye. For technical reasons, it is not possible to stain more than five…
The big idea: why colour is in the eye of the beholder
We might think the sky is blue and trees are green, but the truth is rather stranger
A First-of-Its-Kind Signal Has Been Detected in The Human Brain
Scientists have recently identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that's not been seen before.
Short Articles
Short on time? Check out these useful short articles in Brain—all under 10 minutes.
New Neuroscience Reveals 6 Secrets That Will Increase Your Attention Span
What's it take to increase your attention span? Here's what the latest neuroscience has to say about what we should do...
Magnification and Minimization: Two “Binocular Tricks” of the Mind
The binocular tricks of magnification and minimization are two common forms of cognitive distortion that can impacting our sense of self, our mental health, and even the integrity of our decision…
Your brain wires itself to match your native language
MRI scans of nearly 100 native speakers of either German or Arabic revealed differences in how the language circuits of their brains are connected.
How Loneliness Reshapes the Brain
Feelings of loneliness prompt changes in the brain that further isolate people from social contact.
How Your Beliefs Shape Reality
As you move through the world, it's inevitable that your way of seeing things won't always align with the people around you. Maybe you disagree with the way your neighbor raises her kids, or find your…
Long Articles
These are some of the most-read long-form articles in Brain.
Forgetfulness: The benefits of when your mind goes blank
We've all had those frustrating moments when we struggle to recall someone's name. It turns out these momentary lapses may actually be good for your memory.
Why we can dream in more than one language
Sleep has a more powerful role in language-learning than was previously thought. What does this reveal about our night-time brain?
Ask Ethan: How do fundamental particles create consciousness?
At a fundamental level, only a few particles and forces govern all of reality. How do their combinations create human consciousness?
Old thinking will break your brain.
Why updating the way we look at the world is so critical now, and so hard, and how we can get better at doing it.
Why aren't smart people happier?
A new way to think about brainpower.
«Well-defined problems can be very difficult, but they aren’t mystical. You can write down instructions for solving them. And you can put them on a test.»
Thought Leaders
We monitor hundreds of thought leaders, influencers, and newsletters in Brain, including:

hardmaru
Prompt Engineering @StabilityAI 🚀 東京 Gaijin 🗼 Previous: Research Scientist at Google Brain 🧠 Fixed-Income Ape at Goldman Sachs 🦧
Andrew Ng
Co-Founder of Coursera; Stanford CS adjunct faculty. Former head of Baidu AI Group/Google Brain. #ai #machinelearning, #deeplearning #MOOCs
nature
Research, News, and Commentary from Nature, the international journal of science. For daily science news, get Nature Briefing: http://go.nature.com/naturebriefing
ADDitude
Resources for families touched by attention deficit disorder (ADD/ADHD). Tweets courtesy of the editors & bloggers you love!
Ness Labs
The learning community for ambitious knowledge workers. Join us to think better, learn faster, and work happier: http://nesslabs.com/membership 🧠✨
Publications
We monitor hundreds of publications, blogs, newsletters, and news sources in Brain, including:
Quanta Magazine
Big ideas in science and math. Because you want to know more. Launched by @SimonsFdn. 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. http://quantamagazine.org
Neuroscience News
Official Neuroscience News Twitter. Brain research news articles on neuroscience, psychology, AI, neurology, brain cancer, robotics, mental health & science.
Aeon+Psyche
Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. Psyche is our sister magazine focused on the human condition. Visit http://aeon.co and http://psyche.co for more.
Ness Labs
The learning community for ambitious knowledge workers. Join us to think better, learn faster, and work happier: http://nesslabs.com/membership 🧠✨
Nautilus Magazine
Cutting-edge science, unraveled in award-winning journalism by the very brightest living thinkers. Click the link to subscribe to the newsletter.
What is Refind?
Every day Refind picks the most relevant links from around the web for you. Picking only a handful of links means focusing on what’s relevant and useful. We favor timeless pieces—links with long shelf-lives, articles that are still relevant one month, one year, or even ten years from now. These lists of the best resources on any topic are the result of years of careful curation.
How does Refind curate?
It’s a mix of human and algorithmic curation, following a number of steps:
- We monitor 10k+ sources and 1k+ thought leaders on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
- In addition, our users save links from around the web using our Save buttons and our extensions.
- Our algorithm processes 100k+ new links every day and uses external signals to find the most relevant ones, focusing on timeless pieces.
- Our community of active users gets the most relevant links every day, tailored to their interests. They provide feedback via implicit and explicit signals: open, read, listen, share, mark as read, read later, «More/less like this», etc.
- Our algorithm uses these internal signals to refine the selection.
- In addition, we have expert curators who manually curate niche topics.
The result: lists of the best and most useful articles on hundreds of topics.
How does Refind detect «timeless» pieces?
We focus on pieces with long shelf-lives—not news. We determine «timelessness» via a number of metrics, for example, the consumption pattern of links over time.
How many sources does Refind monitor?
We monitor 10k+ content sources on hundreds of topics—publications, blogs, news sites, newsletters, Substack, Medium, Twitter, etc.
Which sources does Refind monitor in Brain?
We monitor hundreds of sources in Brain, including Quanta Magazine, Neuroscience News, Aeon+Psyche, Ness Labs, Nautilus Magazine, and many more.
Who are the thought leaders in Brain?
We follow dozens of thought leaders in Brain, including hardmaru, Andrew Ng, nature, ADDitude, Ness Labs.
Missing a thought leader? Submit them here
Can I submit a link?
Indirectly, by using Refind and saving links from outside (e.g., via our extensions).
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When you’re logged-in, you can flag any link via the «More» (...) menu. You can also report problems via email to hello@refind.com
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