If you listen to podcasts, you have no doubt heard the phrase ‘Lumosity: Brain games by real neuroscientists’. The idea is simple: Much like the mundane, repetitive tasks like running and lifting weights have positive real-world health benefits, tasks like figuring out if arrows are going up or down or performing math could have positive […]

It is a well-established fact that computers will one day rise up to kill us all. But what is rapidly becoming clear is that they first intend to humiliate us before their xenocidal rampage. A recent report found that roughly half of current U.S. jobs currently filled by humans are likely to be taken by […]

“Even insects express anger, terror, jealousy and love, by their stridulation.”— Charles Darwin (1) Of philosophers who study ethics, 60% rate meat-eating on the ‘immoral’ side of a value scale (compared to 19% of the general population; 2). Such a large discrepancy in beliefs between ethicists and the general population intrigued me. What are the […]

Is the resolve to be so scientific about everything perhaps a kind of fear of, an escape from, pessimism? – Friedrich Nietzsche In the first part of this article we examined contrasts in attitude and outlook between optimistic and pessimistic people and possible differences in the brain leading to these contrasts. The next question is, […]