Psychology

Psychosis and psychedelics

In the 1960s, psychedelic research was driven underground. Now it’s re-emerging – with lessons for the study of psychosis

Phoebe Friesen

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

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