In his most recent book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has revisited his 1991 observation that consciousness arises out of a selection…

Ever since Robert Burton began studying neurology in the 1960s, he has been puzzled by a basic cognitive problem: What does it mean to be convinced? What’s happening in our brain…

1. Unshaven and one bit shortTo death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin’s binary list of life’s certainties, add the expectation that this six-note sequence:  Will continue with this:…

In “Metaphors Are Us,” biologist and neurologist Robert Sapolsky made a good case for why symbolic thinking may be the key feature separating humans from our nearest animal relatives.…

If you dropped a dozen human toddlers on a beautiful Polynesian island with shelter and enough to eat, but no computers, no cell phones, and no metal tools, would they grow up to be…

The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill…