This was originally published on the Scientific American guest blog on February 5th How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that […]

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 […]

This brings me to an ancient Greek, the master himself, Socrates of Athens. In a segment of Gorgias that foresees decades of modern psychological research, the erudite interlocutor observes that […]

If we know that we are bad at predicting and can account for the underlying psychology then why do we continue to make bad predictions?

Consider the story of my first encounter with Sartre. I read Being and Nothingness in college. The professor, a Nietzsche aficionado, explained Sartre’s adage that existence precedes essence. After two […]

I’ve never seen an albatross but I’m told the regal bird can glide for hundreds of miles without flapping his wings. On land, however, the large wings drag like “drifting […]

Henry Molaison, known for most of his life as H.M., was a medical oddity. Surgery to cure severe epilepsy in the 1950s led to the removal of his hippocampus, which […]