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Cognitive Psychology
Descartes broke from the European philosophers who preceded him and devised a new way of considering humanity and the world.
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.”
John Templeton Foundation
The meaning of the cryptic text has eluded scholars for centuries. Their latest efforts include computational analyses seeking new insights into the medieval enigma.
Would you confess your crimes to a skeleton with "an unnatural ghastly glow"? One inventor thought you would.
A recently identified stage of sleep common to narcoleptics is a fertile source of creativity.
Thomas Edison was on to something...
George Orwell got it right: "Never use a long word where a short one will do."
Neuroscience is beginning to provide clues about the emergence of human consciousness.
John Templeton Foundation
If you think everyone around you is terrible, the joke may be on you.
The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia may be due to a "reality threshold" that is lower than it should be.
Forgetting and misremembering are the building blocks of creativity and imagination.
Our bodies crave more food if we haven’t had enough protein, and this can lead to a vicious cycle.
More than a third of Americans don’t get enough sleep. Diet is an important, under-recognized culprit.
How humans came to feel comfortable among strangers, like those in a café, is an under-explored mystery.
John Templeton Foundation
The content of our long-term memories is constantly "reconstructed" by our brains. The same is true of memories formed mere seconds ago.
More than 90 percent of people make a mistake on this test.
This was largely a philosophical question until 2005, when a surgical team in France performed the first partial face transplant.
The study was small and didn't include a placebo group, but there is reason to believe that the drugs really do work.
“It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.”
The secret may lie in an old idiom: "Sleep on it."
This is your brain on work.
It may be an advantage in some contexts.
Intellectual humility demands that we examine our motivations for holding certain beliefs.
John Templeton Foundation
ChatGPT doesn’t understand physics, but it memorizes very well and puts in extra effort.
"I am an anthropologist, and for years, I have spoken to people who have had these experiences."
John Templeton Foundation
"Language is the most distinctively human talent."
Forgetfulness isn't always a "glitch" in our memories; it can be a tool to help us make sense of the present and plan for the future.
Adopting a healthy scepticism towards inherited ideas means “emptying the container of the Self.”
Compared to people who took a placebo, the brains of those who took caffeine pills had a temporarily smaller gray matter volume.