Since World War II, obesity rates in the United States have skyrocketed, our net national savings rate has plummeted, and American adults and kids alike have allocated a rapidly rising proportion of their free time to staring at electrons dancing on screens. What’s happened to our country since the Greatest More
Scientific American: It happens hundreds of times a day: We press snooze on the alarm clock, we pick a shirt out of the closet, we reach for a beer in the fridge. In each case, we conceive of ourselves as free agents, consciously guiding our bodies in purposeful ways. But More
The Wall Street Journal: We believe deeply in our own free will. I decide to walk through the doorway and I do, as simple as that. But from a scientific point of view, free will is extremely puzzling. For science, what we do results from the causal chain of events More
Irish Times: THE NEW YEAR is a time for resolutions. You promise to take up jogging, spend more time with friends, do good works or maybe smile a little more frequently. But are you fundamentally deluding yourself into thinking you can change? A growing body of research suggests that much More
The Nation: We live in the age of the fMRI machine, dazzled and bamboozled by pictures of brains “lighting up” in living Technicolor. Before these neuroscientific glory days, the mysteries of the mind had to be approached by rather less alluring methods: postmortem examination of the brains of psychiatric patients More
NPR: New findings in the science of charity reveals some counter-intuitive results. For instance, people will give more money to a single suffering person than to a population of suffering people, and also give more when some type of physical discomfort — for example, running a marathon — is involved. More
