My 4-year-old daughter and I were deep into a game of checkers one day about three years ago when her eye drifted to a nearby table. There, a black and white board bristled with far…

We have long deemed ourselves to be at the pinnacle of cognitive abilities among animals. But that is different from being at the pinnacle of evolution in a number of very important…

On a late spring evening in 2015, at South Street Seaport, a square on the southern tip of Manhattan, hundreds of people slipped on headphones and slipped into their own worlds. It…

In the fall of 2014, when health officials were fighting to contain an Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Emilio Ferrara was tracking another, far more pervasive pandemic. The contagion…

“When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.”— George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw knew the power of romantic love…

They call him “Dr. WAI,” short for “Where Am I.” A well-educated 29-year-old man without any history of disease or trauma, it took him four tries to produce a semi-accurate…

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.:…

Although post-traumatic stress disorder is an established diagnosis in psychology, and stressed combat veterans are a cliché in Hollywood, it wasn’t long ago when PTSD wasn’t…

One sunny day this fall, I caught a glimpse of the new psychiatry. At a mental hospital near Yale University, a depressed patient was being injected with ketamine. For 40 minutes,…

I was up again at 4 a.m. the other night, one of five nocturnal ramblings in the early morning, the new me. No sleep. Picking my way in the dark, familiar territory of a home on Cape…