Lost in space

Some neurological disorders affect people’s ability to navigate their neighborhood or even their own home, the more the rest of us rely on our phones to follow directions, the worse we all get at finding our own way through the world.

Lonely as a cloud

What makes our mind wander when we want to concentrate on a task, and why can that help us come up with an answer that sitting at our desk does not?

Where did language come from?

Language is one of mankind’s most important and ubiquitous inventions, but nobody really knows how it developed or where it came from.

Why awe is awesome

Awe is a complex emotional state we experience when the enormity of what we see or feel transcends what we understand and we all need more of it in our lives.

Let the children play

Children who demonstrate pretend play ability as toddlers have significantly fewer emotional and behavioural difficulties at primary school, according to a new interdisciplinary University of Sydney study.

Headspace

What happens to the memories we would like to keep? Some of them will fade – not because the brain has run out of space, but because they are not continually reinforced as memory is not preserved simply because it matters to us but only when it is revisited, retold, or reconnected to other experiences.

Tales of mystery and imagination

Visual perception arrives with a strength and regularity the brain’s own internal patterns don’t match. Imagination works with those patterns rather than against them, reshaping what is already there into something we can almost see.

Your brain for sale

Your browsing history, your location, your political preferences. For years, tech companies have found ways to turn personal data into profit. Now, a new and far more intimate frontier is opening: the electrical signals produced by your brain.

Doughnuts and decision making

The next time you find yourself in line at the bakery, you’ll find your brain has already been quietly gathering evidence toward your baked good of choice, and that choice happens a little faster than you realise.

A world appears

Michael Pollan’s new book “A World Appears” tells the story of humanity’s philosophical, artistic and scientific quest to solve the mystery of consciousness.

Shining a light on short-term memory

We often treat short-term memory like a light switch which is either on or off but that understanding how “fuzzy memories” work can improve our recall and decision‑making.

Forever Jung

Where Freud reduced the human psyche to repressed drives, Jung expanded it into something vast and mythic. Indeed, his concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes and individuation were an audacious attempt to map what it means to be human in an age before biological neuroscience.