For millennia, we’d never seen anything like film cuts. How do we process them so easily?

7 minutes

Where pain lives

Fixing chronic back pain is possible only when patients understand how much it is produced by the brain, not the spine

Cathryn Jakobson Ramin

Imagination is ancient

Our imaginative life today has access to the pre-linguistic, ancestral mind: rich in imagery, emotions and associations

Stephen T Asma

The history of brainwashing is a red flag for techno-therapy

David Saunders

What to make of a Riot Grrrl? A snapshot of feminism and high school in the 1990s

18 minutes

Keeping it in the family: why we pick the partners we do

Tamsin Saxton

Freud the philosopher

Before fathering psychoanalysis, Freud first slayed the dominant Cartesian intellectual tradition of mind-body dualism

David Livingstone Smith

Why can concave surfaces look convex when viewed from overhead (and vice versa)?

4 minutes

Indescribable you

Can novelists or psychologists better capture the strange multitude of realities in every human self?

Carlin Flora

Humans are the only animals who crave oblivion through suicide

Nicholas Humphrey

Now you see it, now you…

Seeing things that are hidden; failing to see things in plain sight. How magic exploits the everyday weirdness of perception

Vebjørn Ekroll

Psychopaths have feelings: can they learn how to use them?

Arielle Baskin-Sommers

Magic from the mundane – paper towels flourish in the hands of a coffeeshop artist

2 minutes

How we learn to read another’s mind by looking into their eyes

Tobias Grossmann

Meet the lucky little organ that is uniquely dedicated to pleasure

3 minutes

Laughing at others’ misfortune is fine for ‘fail’ videos. It’s poison for politics

6 minutes

Fear of radiation is more dangerous than radiation itself

David Ropeik

Solving the heroin overdose mystery: how small doses can kill

Shepard Siegel

Microaggressions?

Prejudice remains a huge social evil but evidence for harm caused by microaggression is incoherent, unscientific and weak

Scott O Lilienfeld

Harlem’s over-55s synchronised swimming team thinks ageing is better in the pool

4 minutes

Cognitive dissonance helps old dogs with their new tricks

Suzanne Cope

How totalism works

The brainwashing methods of isolation, engulfment and fear can lead anyone to a cult. I should know – I was in one

Alexandra Stein

From a 77-year relationship to a first date – a brisk, cheery survey of love

3 minutes

The orgasm cure

What if we could expand ecstasy, reduce stress and lift depression, all by delaying and extending orgasm?

Peter von Ziegesar

The crisis of expertise

Experts are either derided or held up as all-seeing gurus. Time to reboot the relationship between expertise and democracy

Tom Nichols

How a once overlooked civil-rights leader became an icon of gay marriage equality

16 minutes

First impressions count

A judgment of competence is made in a tenth of a second on the basis of facial features. Thus political decisions are made

Alexander Todorov

Will they or won’t they? Prospective jumpers anguish at the edge of the high dive

16 minutes

We could all do with learning how to improvise a little better

Stephen T Asma