It’s difficult to categorize Siri Hustvedt. She is, first and foremost, a writer and a thinker. Her well-known novels include What I Loved and The Sorrows Of An American. They explore, among various other topics, the nature of perception and identity. But her prose goes beyond the typical themes ...

Human evolution is puzzling. Around 45,000 years ago, for no obvious reason, our species took off. Our technology rapidly progressed, populations thrived and we started painting and crafting instruments. All of this and more culminated in our first civilizations. From there, we started growing food ...

One of the great mysteries of art is why it exists. Although our desire to create and enjoy art is so widespread that it appears as natural as eating or reproducing -– nearly every culture draws, dances, sings, recites poetry and tells stories -– the origins of human aesthetics are not clear-cut ...

While writing this post, my mood will vary. I’ll enjoy the beginning – riffing on a new idea is always exciting – but I’ll inevitably hit difficult patches. A few cat memes and visits to Facebook might resolve the mental strain, but eventually, a feeling of guilt will pull me back to this article ...

I dreaded writing papers in college. I probably spent more time worrying about what I was going to write than actually writing. As much as I tried, I just couldn’t get excited about Kant’s categorical imperative or Plato’s take on justice. Did Kant correctly identify the origins of human morality ...

By the time French police arrested him in 1969, Frank Abagnale had posed as a lawyer, doctor, U.S. Bureau of Prisons agent, teaching assistant at Brigham Young University, pilot and, “passed $2.5 million worth of meticulously forged checks across 26 countries.” By any standard, Abagnale - who ...

“Are great musician born or made?” That question was posed by Gary Marcus, who at the age of 38, wondered if he could overcome a lifetime of musical failure – at one point when he was younger a teacher politely told him to stop taking recorder lessons. Marcus’ problem wasn’t a lack of neurons. A ...

In 1981, Arthur Leonard Schawlow won the Nobel prize in physics for his contributions to laser spectroscopy. When asked what made the difference between highly creative and less creative scientists he responded: "The labor of love aspect is important. The most successful scientists often are not ...

In the 17th century, the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes famously argued that, “the mind or soul of man is entirely different from the body.” With this move, Descartes forever enshrined himself as a dualist. Modern science tells us that Descartes was wrong; our bodies and ...

It’s easy to see why, for most of human history, a creative insight was thought of as a divine spirit that came from “some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reason,” as Elizabeth Gilbert notes. In an instant, impasse gives way to revelation. And is it not peculiar that ...

Like many college students, I took a semester abroad. I spent the first half of my junior year in London taking classes at UCL, exploring the museums, and learning the difference between two pints, two pounds and two pence. After a few lovely months on the “other” side of the pond I returned home ...

Several years ago University of California at Davis professor Dean Simonton conducted a study that examined more than three hundred creative geniuses born between 1450 and 1850. The list included thinkers Liebniz and Descartes, scientists Newton and Copernicus and artists Vinci and Rembrandt. He ...

For most of human history creativity was something that came from the muses; it was about flashes of insight from another world. Today we know that creativity is something that happens in the brain; many psychologists and neuroscientists are working to identify cognitive mechanisms and processes ...

Shakespeare was a ruthless thief. Some of his first plays – the three parts of Henry VI – were so similar to Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great that many eighteenth-century scholars believed Marlowe wrote them. By today’s standards, the plays of Henry VI were a copyright lawsuit waiting to ...

Sigmund Freud postulated that dreaming is a reflection of the unleashed id; it represents one’s deep sexual fantasies and frustrations implanted during childhood. But what happens when we fall asleep is usually much less dramatic; we dream about the problems of everyday life. Now scientists ...