Buzz Bissinger, author of the book “Friday Night Lights,” once wrote an extraordinary story in GQ Magazine where he admitted to owning 81 leather jackets, dozens of pairs of boots and leather gloves, a $5,000 pair of pants, and a $22,000 coat. He had recently attended Milan Fashion Week as an all-expenses paid guest of Gucci — and said [ … ]
Despite the advances of neuroscience, we’re no closer to understanding how the physical brain generates consciousness than we ever were. What if it’s actually a far simpler mechanism than we imagined, and even more intriguing, what if we already have a model for it? Drill right down and a brain is comprised of a huge number of [ … ]
In our market-based economy, everyone has a boss. Most of us answer to a manager or supervisor, but even the CEO answers to shareholders. So the pressures of being judged for your work hardly vanish the further up the ladder you climb. And if you asked them, many business leaders would probably tell you they miss the [ … ]
Marijuana (cannabis) is one of the most controversial and politicized controlled substances in the United States. It has many names — Mary Jane, pot, ganja, sativa, etc. — and stories about it ranging from positive to negative, depending on whom you ask, abound. The tide, however, seems to be turning. [ … ]
The ultraconnectivity of our modern society is causing a wholesale shift in the way we retain information in our heads. Where most of history has been a process of wielding tools to remember things for us (everything from scratches on papyrus to the PC), we’re entering an age where we don’t really have [ … ]
Since time immemorial, we’ve seen ghosts. Whether it’s a disembodied voice whispering in the night, the classic lady in white drifting through walls, or even a candle flickering in a room with a closed window, art and culture have made these uncanny episodes as familiar to us as they are to the mystics and psychics [ … ]
Somewhere in our heads, a constant mental narrative tells us where we are, if we’re upside down, where our physical self stops and where the surrounding world begins. Body awareness, also called the body schema or corporeal awareness, is essential for a host of functions that don’t get much attention [ … ]
It’s a central principle of owning a human body that if you don’t use it, you lose it. Singers have to practice hitting the high notes to keep vocal range wide and vocal cords limber. Basketballers have to shoot countless hoops to hone their technique. We all have to get out of the easy chair and get a little exercise [ … ]
The idea that sleep has a reparative effect on the brain is longstanding. But while there’s almost a century of evidence from psychology on things like long-term memory consolidation, we still don’t really know what the physiological mechanism is. [ … ]
She’s your favorite actress. You’ve been following her career since she was in her early teens. You know her face with as much familiarity as family members. You can see the time she was being interviewed on the red carpet and gave her passing co-star a high five in your minds eye photographically. [ … ]
When it comes to capturing and transferring the activity of the mind, imagine some sort of neural scanner that can read the on/off states of every neuron in your brain, and is then able to transpose these into a computer program or even into another human brain. Might the “I” you can feel living in your body shake [ … ]
As a cultural or religious practice, fasting has a long enough history that some anthropologists are tempted to think it has a biological or evolutionary basis. Maybe periods of food scarcity in our hunter-gatherer past gave us a healthy respect for starvation [ … ]
Our sense of self is one of the deepest and seemingly immobile expressions of brain activity. If something as innocuous as a magnetic field can change it then, who are we, really? At some time during our toddler years, we start to understand that we’re a distinct person with free will and [ … ]
Nobody can tell you how it feels. Maybe you can’t even make sense of how it feels yourself. Your feelings — along with what feels like most of your organs — might be twisted in knots so bad you want to throw up. What is your brain doing right now after surviving being raped? Understanding that might be one of the first steps to [ … ]
The reason love is so hard to pin down scientifically isn’t just because it takes so many different forms (between friends, parents and offspring, pets, etc.) but because it’s not so much a part of the evolutionary urge as we first assumed. Some romantic love — like homosexuality, or the schoolyard crush we experience [ … ]
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