Psychology

Animal, vegetable, mineral

Cruel and unscientific, the ‘vegetative state’ diagnosis stems from a hierarchical and bigoted view of all living things

Ben Platts-Mills

Stuck with the soul

The idea of the soul is obviously a nonsense, yet its immaterial mysterious nature has deep hooks in the human psyche

David P Barash

Seeing and somethingness

An evolutionary approach to consciousness can resolve the ‘hard problem’ – with radical implications for animal sentience

Nicholas Humphrey

The brain repurposed our sense of physical distance to understand social closeness

5 minutes

You need to make friends with pain to run through the Grand Canyon and back

5 minutes

A tender poem doubles as a guide to sitting comfortably in one’s own company

3 minutes

Autistic children and adults sketch out the look and feel of their sensory world

11 minutes

Pivotal mental states

Spiritual highs and mental breakdowns are both products of the same evolved brain system granting us the power to transform

Ari Brouwer

‘Meditation without meditating’ might be possible. Can it also be made ethical?

9 minutes

Nightmares becalmed

I’m a dream engineer. Through touch, scent and sound, we help people rescript the dramas of their sleeping lives

Michelle Carr

Brain wifi

Instead of a code encrypted in the wiring of our neurons, could consciousness reside in the brain’s electromagnetic field?

Johnjoe McFadden

The dark side of ego loss – what it’s like to disappear into depersonalisation

9 minutes

In exile from the dreamscape

We live in a wake-centric world that devalues dreaming, yet we need to experience dreams to be our authentic selves

Rubin Naiman