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Psychology

Essays and videos offering insights into the self, relationships, cognition and neuroscience
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essay

Neuroscience

How to make a map of smell

We can split light by a prism, sounds by tones, but surely the world of odour is too complex and personal? Strangely, no

Jason Castro

Bees push coloured tabs to access a sugary reward
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video

Cognition and intelligence

What’s this buzz about bees having culture? Inside a groundbreaking experiment

8 minutes

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Philosophy of mind

What colour do you see?

New research is uncovering the hidden differences in how people experience the world. The consequences are unsettling

Gary Lupyan

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Cognition and intelligence

Are you an artistic genius?

Maybe not, but if that’s the threshold you use for creativity in your life, you are coming at the problem all wrong

James C Kaufman

A Panama hat rests on a bed bathed in afternoon light filtering through gauze curtains. There is a slight motion blur
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Consciousness and altered states

Déjà vu

Have you been here before? The eerie sensation is the shadow of your mind searching inward for clues to its own survival

Anne Cleary

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Stories and literature

The sonnet machine

A sonnet contains an emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution, crafted to make us think and feel

Timothy Hampton

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Biology

Octopus time

We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time?

David Borkenhagen

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Computing and artificial intelligence

What has feelings?

As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals

Kristin Andrews & Jonathan Birch

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Philosophy of mind

Super-cooperators

Clear and direct telepathic communication is unlikely to be developed. But brain-to-brain links still hold great promise

Gary Lupyan & Andy Clark

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video

Computing and artificial intelligence

Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination

5 minutes

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Knowledge

A sliver of reality

Science and mathematics may never fully capture the physical universe. Are there hard limits to human intelligence?

David H Wolpert

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Evolution

Connected-up-brains

Bat friends, monkeys sharing, and humans holding hands: the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

Sofia Quaglia

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Knowledge

Imaginology

We need a new kind of approach to learning that shifts imagination from the periphery to the foundation of all knowledge

Stephen T Asma

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Cognition and intelligence

Modular cognition

Powerful tricks from computer science and cybernetics show how evolution ‘hacked’ its way to intelligence from the bottom up

Michael Levin & Rafael Yuste

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video

Philosophy of mind

Embodied cognition seems intuitive, but philosophy can push it to some strange places

14 minutes

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Stories and literature

The art of the plot twist

Some twists infuriate; others are brilliant. But they both use the surprise story as a self-exploding confidence game

Vera Tobin

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Human evolution

Homo imaginatus

Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do

Philip Ball

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Cognition and intelligence

On the origin of minds

Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years

Pamela Lyon

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video

Film and visual culture

A Palme d’Or-winning animation toys with the way our eyes perceive light

5 minutes

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video

Knowledge

What can a Kurosawa classic tell us about reality, knowledge and truth?

5 minutes

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Biology

Enduring memory

How can animals whose brains have been drastically remodelled still recall their kin, their traumas and their skills?

Thomas R Verny

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Cognition and intelligence

A theory of my own mind

Knowing the content of one’s own mind might seem straightforward but in fact it’s much more like mindreading other people

Stephen M Fleming

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video

Film and visual culture

A series of animated illusions illustrates how we project depth on to flat surfaces

8 minutes

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video

Cognition and intelligence

How a ‘periodic table’ of animal intelligence could help to root out human bias

5 minutes