Psychology

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

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