A revolution in our sense of self | Nick Chater

Psychologists have tried to plumb the depths of human motivation to make sense of our behaviour. But our inner mental world is a fiction, sustained by constant improvisation

Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

Solitary work, creativity and larval ideas

New paradigm for psychology just dropped

OR: the ideas your mother warned you about

Works in Progress: The Long Journey to Doing Good Better

The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know. — Albert Einstein

Why major life decisions should be approached with ‘epistemic humility’ | Psyche Videos

At a crossroads in life? No matter how much you deliberate, one unknowable remains: the person you will be on the other side

The secret to living a meaningful life

Your ambitions to improve your life do not need to be confined by your personality.

‘My brain feels like it’s been punched’: the intolerable rise of perfectionism

The pursuit of perfection, taken to extremes, can lead to OCD and depression – and the number of students reporting the problem has jumped by 33% since 1989

Opinion | Can You Get Smarter? (Published 2015)

There is much that you can do to keep cognitively sharp.

Survival of the Prettiest (Published 2017)

Darwin’s theory of aesthetics may be the sexiest, most dangerous idea in evolution.

I should have loved biology too

How I went from hating it to being obsessed, the allure of great writing, and a post-scuba-dive moment of clarity

How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology

“Bold and intriguing.”—Wall Street Journal • “Penetrating. . . . Provocative and profound.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) • “Offers plenty of food for thought.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)  “Ball’s marvelous book is both wide-ranging and deep. . . . I could not put it down.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Song of the Cell and the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Emperor of All Maladies A new, cutting-edge vision of biology that revises our understanding of what life itself is, how to enhance it, and what possibilities it offers.   Biology is undergoing a quiet but profound transformation. Several aspects of the standard picture of how life works—the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular machines, of cells as entities with fixed identities, and more—have been exposed as incomplete, misleading, or wrong.   In How Life Works, Philip Ball explores the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more ingenious affair than we had guessed. Ball explains that there is no unique place to look for an answer to this question: life is a system of many levels—genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules such as the immune system and the nervous system—each with its own rules and principles. How Life Works explains how these levels operate, interface, and work together (most of the time).   With this knowledge come new possibilities. Today we can redesign and reconfigure living systems, tissues, and organisms. We can reprogram cells, for instance, to carry out new tasks and grow into structures not seen in the natural world. As we discover the conditions that dictate the forms into which cells organize themselves, our ability to guide and select the outcomes becomes ever more extraordinary. Some researchers believe that ultimately we will be able to regenerate limbs and organs, and perhaps even create new life forms that evolution has never imagined.   Incorporating the latest research and insights, How Life Works is a sweeping journey into this new frontier of the life sciences, a realm that will reshape our understanding of life as we know it.

Explorable - Think Outside The Box - Research, Experiments, Psychology, Self-Help

"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default." - J.K. Rowling

Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology

‘This Handbook is refreshingly different. While including requisite chapters on subfields within evolutionary psychology, it also includes chapters on evolutionary psychology’s influence on other disciplines (e.g., Anthropology, Criminology), and retrospectives on six foundational studies. And perhaps most innovative, chapters are written by an international collection of up-and-coming scholars who give their take on the current and future state of evolutionary psychology.’ – David F. Bjorklund, Florida Atlantic University, USA

What does it really mean to have a moment of insight? | Psyche Notes to Self

From art to science to love, the moment of insight happens when we see a likeness between different things

Open source confronts its midlife crisis | The Observation Deck

Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown: the kids that were such a fresh adventure when they were infants and toddlers are now grappling with their own transition into adulthood – and you try to remind yourself that the kids that you have sacrificed so much for probably don’t actually hate your guts, regardless of that post they just liked on the ‘gram. Making things more challenging, while you are navigating the turbulence of teenagers, your own parents are likely entering life’s twilight, needing help in new ways from their adult children. By midlife, in addition to the singular joys of life, you have also likely experienced its terrible sorrows: death, heartbreak, betrayal. Taken together, the fading of youth, the growth in responsibility and the endurance of misfortune can lead to cynicism or (worse) drastic and poorly thought-out choices. Add in a little fear of mortality and some existential dread, and you have the stuff of which midlife crises are made…

This Is Your Brain on Podcasts (Published 2016)

Different people’s brains absorb a compelling story in the roughly the same complicated pattern, using many parts of the brain, researchers found.