The Romantic stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder is dangerous, and dissolves under careful scrutiny | Continue reading
Liberating oneself from rebirths might seem irrelevant to the non-believer. But nirvana is also a profound psychological goal | Continue reading
Some of the most important decisions you will make in your lifetime will occur while you feel stressed and anxious. From medical decisions to financial and professional ones, we are often required to weigh up information under stressful conditions... | Continue reading
In a warming world, ticks thrive in more places than ever before, making Lyme disease the first epidemic of climate change | Continue reading
Tech flourished in communist Bulgaria and so did a body of science fiction asking vital philosophical questions | Continue reading
The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether? | Continue reading
In 2015, Niamh Geaney, a 28-year-old Irish woman, was approached by a TV production company to participate in an unusual competition: a race to find her twin stranger, a stranger who looks exactly like her. Within two weeks of scouring social netw... | Continue reading
Rather than a golden ratio or a moral judgment, beauty is more like a radical jolt that awakens us to the world | Continue reading
Neuroscience gives us invaluable, wondrous knowledge about the brain – including an awareness of its limitations | Continue reading
Namibian hunter-gatherers deride those who stand out. What does this tell us about why, and how, we care about fairness? | Continue reading
A growing number of philosophers are conducting experiments to test their arguments. Is this the future for philosophy? | Continue reading
Urbanisation might be the most profound change to human society in a century, more telling than colour, class or continent | Continue reading
Just one in five people will be lucky enough to avoid mental health problems throughout their life. How do they do it? | Continue reading
In 1890 William Morris imagined a world free from wage slavery. Thanks to technology, his vision is finally within reach | Continue reading
More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon. I’ve termed it ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is pos... | Continue reading