… When we recall our own memories, we are not extracting a perfect record of our experiences and playing it back verbatim. Most people believe that memory works this way, but it doesn’t. Instead, we are effectively whispering a message from our past to our present, reconstructing it on the […] Read more »
The Battle for Your Brain
… Our tendency toward partisanship is likely the result of evolution—forming groups is how prehistoric humans survived. That’s helpful when trying to master an unforgiving environment with Stone Age technology. It’s less so when trying to foster a functional democracy. Understanding the other side’s point of view, even if one […] Read more »
Are the Rich Coldhearted?
I feel your pain. These words are famously associated with Bill Clinton, who as a politician seemed to ooze empathy. A skeptic might wonder, though, whether he truly was personally distressed by the suffering of average Americans. Can people in high positions of power — presidents, bosses, celebrities, even dominant […] Read more »
The Biology of Risk
… Risk is more than an intellectual puzzle — it is a profoundly physical experience, and it involves your body. Risk by its very nature threatens to hurt you, so when confronted by it your body and brain, under the influence of the stress response, unite as a single functioning […] Read more »
Think Internet Data Mining Goes Too Far? Then You Won’t Like This
These days, you can hop on the Internet and buy yourself a consumer-grade brain scanning device for just a few hundred dollars. Technically, they’re called brain computer interfaces, or BCIs. As these devices develop, researchers are thinking a few steps ahead — they’re worried about how to keep marketers from […] Read more »
I don’t want to be right
… Not all false information goes on to become a false belief—that is, a more lasting state of incorrect knowledge—and not all false beliefs are difficult to correct. … When there’s no immediate threat to our understanding of the world, we change our beliefs. It’s when that change contradicts something […] Read more »