Psychology

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

The mathematics of mind-time

The special trick of consciousness is being able to project action and time into a range of possible futures

Karl Friston

What know-it-alls don’t know, or the illusion of competence

Kate Fehlhaber

Artistic genius and fragility intersect in this surreal, Oscar®-winning animation

14 minutes

Living with Asperger’s is a delicate balance between external and internal worlds

12 minutes

Our world outsmarts us

Social problems are fantastically complex, while human minds are severely under-engineered. Is democracy doomed?

Robert Burton

Ageing to the beat of their own drums – from one to 100 years old

3 minutes

If money can make you happy, does debt make you sad?

Cassondra Batz

What lurks beneath

The grand drama of Freud’s ideas has obscured the reality: every school of psychology needs a theory of the unconscious

Antonio Melechi

Why is the brain prone to florid forms of confabulation?

Jules Montague

The brain-heart dialogue shows how racism hijacks perception

Manos Tsakiris

Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’

Abeba Birhane

Meeting your boyfriend’s family is hard. Agata must travel 3,000 miles. And she’s blind

13 minutes

Touched

We ride a stream of naked neurons, stripped of their sheaths, to the most blissful moments and deepest intimacies of life

Steven M Phelps

Never judge a book by its cover. But what about people and their faces?

12 minutes

How a dairy farmer preached radical self-acceptance to his gay son in the 1950s

4 minutes

A happy life is built on pleasures such as sex and food, but also company and variety

7 minutes

Tripping in the ICU

For those suffering the trauma of intensive care, the soothing swoosh of otherworldly ambient music can be a welcome gift

Charles Fernyhough

The bilingual brain: why one size doesn’t fit all

Angela Grant

Optical illusions show how past experience dramatically influences perception

4 minutes

Dishonesty gets easier on the brain the more you do it

Neil Garrett

An elderly man dedicates himself to saving lives at Japan’s ‘suicide cliffs’

40 minutes

Sleepwalking is the result of a survival mechanism gone awry

Philip Jaekl

The seductive lie of ‘Patient Zero’ and the outbreak narrative

Leyla Mei