Are You Hitting Your Limit, or Getting Stronger? The Power of Reinterpreting Mental Effort Listen to your elders, they say. Well, I wasn’t sure what to think when as a seven-year-old I sat in the kitchen and listened to my … Continue reading Mental gym
Immediately Re-Watching Lecture Videos Doesn’t Benefit Learning Given a passage of text to study, many students repeatedly re-read it in the hope the information will eventually stick. Psychology research has shown the futility of this approach. Re-reading is a poor … Continue reading Distributed practice
Folie à deux and Homicide for the Holidays Nothing says home for the holidays like a series of murders committed by family members with a shared delusion. So sit back, sip your hot apple cider or spiked egg nog, and … Continue reading Is insanity contagious?
Where is the boundary between your phone and your mind? Many of the boundary lines in our lives are highly literal, and, for the most part, this is how we’ve been trained to think of boundaries: as demarcations shored up … Continue reading Borders
Who decides what words mean Decades before the rise of social media, polarisation plagued discussions about language. By and large, it still does. Everyone who cares about the topic is officially required to take one of two stances. Either you … Continue reading The ultimate self-regulating system
In Defense of Puns Once upon a time—in 382 C.E., to be exact—Eve bit into an apple. Seeing it was good, she offered the apple to Adam, and he also took a bite. Whereupon Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, … Continue reading Puns for the mind
Just Deserts Caruso: [Dan,] you have famously argued that freedom evolves and that humans, alone among the animals, have evolved minds that give us free will and moral responsibility. I, on the other hand, have argued that what we do … Continue reading Are you responsible for your actions?
