But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’. This reminds me of that po … | Continue reading
Let Descartes, Kant and other philosophers help you view the world through a more positive filter and you’ll bloom | Continue reading
Birds, bees, cats and other animals have an ability to use numbers. How can this help us understand people with dyscalculia? | Continue reading
The path to mastery is long, winding and hugely fulfilling. Use this map to navigate and overcome any bumps along the way | Continue reading
Physics tells us that time doesn’t flow like a river, as Heraclitus claimed. Why then do we feel like we’re swept along? | Continue reading
The first thing to remember is that the great philosophers were only human. Then you can start disagreeing with them | Continue reading
In terms of irrational confidence, many people at opposite ends of the political spectrum seem to have something in common | Continue reading
Always blaming yourself or assuming others think ill of you? A CBT therapist shares ways to break these self-critical habits | Continue reading
To be tolerant you need both to sustain your moral beliefs and at the same time resist the temptation to act on them | Continue reading
Keeping up with the Faerie Queene: from early modern romances to reality TV, does bingeing ‘lowbrow’ culture rot the brain? | Continue reading
Stoicism might help you as an individual. But we need a philosophy that doesn’t dull us to the injustices of the world | Continue reading
Algorithmic expression is not the classic, liberal model of speech. Instead, it is speech unmoored from personhood | Continue reading
Ancient Babylonian astronomers help us see that our view of the world is as much a product of our senses as of our culture | Continue reading
New evidence of the power of the placebo effect – even without any deception – is raising important questions for medicine | Continue reading
Indian metaphysics presented a philosophical route to a higher level of existence beyond limits of space and time | Continue reading
The neural basis of ‘interoception’ – the interpretation of bodily signals – is affected in many mental health conditions | Continue reading
Unrequited love might be bitter and painful, but it is also the ultimate expression of your humanity. Don’t fight it | Continue reading
Living in poverty is not caused by a faulty mindset, it’s a response to scarcity and marginalisation | Continue reading
Do you feel uneasy about your drinking or drug use? Recognising the signs of addiction can be the first step to recovery | Continue reading
Public philosophy aims to improve critical thinking so that we gain a better understanding of the world and of ourselves | Continue reading
The media bias problem as a clash of power and psychology – the historic argument between Upton Sinclair and Walter Lippmann | Continue reading
Taking a break isn’t lazy – learning to recharge is a skill that will allow you to enjoy a more creative, sustainable life | Continue reading
Functional brain scans are a valuable tool but their meaning must be interpreted with caution and scepticism | Continue reading
‘Might not madness be a mere derangement of memory?’ What Arthur Schopenhauer learnt when he went into the asylum | Continue reading
Understanding depression as an altered state of consciousness, like a dream or drug trip, could help people awaken from it | Continue reading
From the docks of 12th-century Genoa to the gambling tables of today, risk is a story that we tell ourselves about the future | Continue reading
Prior research has focused on the negative reasons people are drawn to conspiracies, but there’s another side to the story | Continue reading
Old ideas of manliness make us miserable. Being labelled ‘toxic’ doesn’t help. A reimagined masculinity is the way forward | Continue reading
By using ‘distanced self-talk’, you can leverage the structure of language to take a step back and see the bigger picture | Continue reading
Our emotional responses evolved in a very different world. In the online era, that makes us more vulnerable to privacy risks | Continue reading
Learning Latin shouldn’t be like solving crossword puzzles – it was a living language and is best learnt by speaking it | Continue reading
The evidence for fungal intelligence is in: they can operate as individuals, make decisions, learn, and have short-term memory | Continue reading
Forget cramming, ditch the highlighter, and stop passively rereading. The psychology of learning offers better tactics | Continue reading
Do you keep putting things off when you know you shouldn’t? Get going by understanding the psychology of irrational delay | Continue reading
Struggling to understand is perfectly honourable. Being wilfully stupid is something else and we should strive to fix it | Continue reading
Don’t believe everything you hear, read and watch. To puncture received ideas about culture, start thinking like Jacques Derrida | Continue reading
Rather than mindless mechanisms for routines, habits are a species of belief that display a great deal of intelligence | Continue reading
China’s personal computing revolution was born not in a suburban garage but a prison cell, and fine-tuned on a teacup | Continue reading
Phone-free events are on the rise: is the tide turning from the false intimacy of screens towards true social interaction? | Continue reading
Whether your aim is improved health, mental calm or achieving transcendence, breathing techniques can help you get there | Continue reading
There’s more to words than meets the eye. Deepen your appreciation of literature through the art of slow, attentive reading | Continue reading
You can’t stop people making demands on your time and energy, but you can develop assertiveness skills to protect yourself | Continue reading
Does attention distort knowledge, or am I overthinking it? What visual illusions say about the secret workings of the mind | Continue reading
The colour violet was largely missing from art before the Impressionists, and is seen differently by different cultures. Why? | Continue reading
Weirdly hard to define, much less to feel OK about it, pleasure is a tricky creature. Can philosophy help us lighten up? | Continue reading
Machine learning is a black box – even when the decision is correct, how the algorithm arrived at it can be a mystery | Continue reading
By learning to question and clarify your thoughts, you’ll improve your self-knowledge and become a better communicator | Continue reading
Pinning down the slippery strangeness of dissociation is like grappling with a bar of soap, but it badly needs a definition | Continue reading