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Ditch the old brain vs. heart assumptions, and instead think about a heart-led brain.

In a psychedelic state, the relationship between your “narrative” and “minimal” selves seems to transform in unique ways.

When we rely on the conscious mind alone, we lose; but when we listen to the body, we gain a winning edge.

Science and the humanities have been antagonistic for too long. Many of the big questions of our time require them to work closer than ever.

You actually score worse on memory tests.

Picking up where we left off a year ago, a conversation about the homeostatic imperative as it plays out in everything from bacteria to pharmaceutical companies—and how the marvelous apparatus of the human mind also gets us into all kinds of trouble.

Sometimes you have to take the road less traveled.

Silicon Valley might just be missing the most important aspect of being human: the ability to feel.

Sometimes lacking proper language is just a failure of imagination.

In his new book, Nick Chater writes that what we see is what we get.

Where do cultures come from? The answer is as old as life itself.

The authors conclude that it does, after claiming it doesn't.

Consciousness is body-dependent. VR enthusiasts are betting otherwise.

It’s tempting to think of the mind as a layer that sits on top of more primitive cognitive structures. We experience ourselves as conscious beings, after all, in a way […]

New research at USC shows universal brain activity in the comprehension of stories for the first time. 

The beloved honeybee has more in common with vertebrates that anyone thought.  

There's more to intuition than meets the eye.

If free will doesn't exist, is it healthier to believe it does? 

Your brain has a smart filter that pushes out irrelevant data so we can be unburdened from remembering.

Constant touching and emotional warmth are essential to cognitive development, yet our educational and professional environments are skeptical, often for litigious reasons.

Leading a team of experts to reach creative heights may be the mark of today's genius.

Decades of neuroscientific research may be culminating in treatment to help those with short attention spans overcome their lack of focus.

            Should scientists advocate on policy issues, or, to protect their personal credibility and the credibility of their findings, should they just quietly do their work and avoid making policy […]

Consider one last autobiographical note before I answer the question: “How do we avoid the Sartre Fallacy?” I conducted an independent study my senior year that focused on biases and […]

     Over at “Mind Matters”, my fellow blogger David Berreby offers an intriguing post Is Individual Liberty Over-Rated about some some new discussion of an old theme that I also […]

By understanding what causes shifts in how we experience consciousness, neuroscientists will be able to understand more fully what underpins our connection to the external world. 

If we wish to honor our 21st century gods (technology, capitalism), we might do well to hold a competition that celebrates the achievements of the human mind, not the body. 

The neuroscience behind decision-making.

Hello readers. I’ve been on vacation for the last several days. Here’s an old post from my previous blog WhyWeReason.com to fill the void. It’s about a paper by the NYU […]

            In his groundbreaking 1995 book Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio describes Elliott, a patient who had no problem understanding information, but who nonetheless could not live a normal life. Elliott […]