By Douglas Fox, Scientific American An excerpt: ... One might think, for example, that evolutionary processes could increase the number of neurons in our brain or boost the rate at which those neurons exchange information and that such changes would make us smarter. But several recent trends of investigation...

By Benedict Carey, The New York Times Like any other high school junior, Wynn Haimer has a few holes in his academic game. Graphs and equations, for instance: He gets the idea, fine — one is a linear representation of the other — but making those conversions is often a headache. Or at least it was. For...

By Carl Zimmer, Discover magazine The past and future may seem like different worlds, yet the two are intimately intertwined in our minds. In recent studies on mental time travel, neuroscientists found that we use many of the same regions of the brain to remember the past as we do to envision our future...

By Colin McGinn, The New York Review of Books 3/24/2011 Excerpt: Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on...

By Martin Sandbu, The Financial Times January 13, 2011 Aristotle took a dim view of business. Sometimes, of course, business people give the impression of being equally unconcerned with Aristotle’s main concern: living a good life. Just witness the grilling Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, received...

From the New York Times A summary: Scientists have found indications that your ability to jump to intuitive answers — what they term the “Aha!” moment — may be affected by your mood. After watching a humorous video, brain imaging and test results of subjects suggested that a positive mood prepares the...

By Benedict Carey 12/6/2010, The New York Times The puzzles look easy, and mostly they are. Given three words — “trip,” “house” and “goal,” for example — find a fourth that will complete a compound word with each. A minute or so of mental trolling (housekeeper, goalkeeper, trip?) is all it usually takes...

By Jonah Lehrer, Wired October 12, 2010 There’s a fascinating new paper in Psychological Science by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis on the virtues of unconscious thought when it comes to predicting the outcome of soccer matches. It turns out that the conscious brain – that rational voice in your...

by Katherine Harmon, Scientific American Gray Matter Shows Introspective Ability Is Not Black and White When answering a question, your accuracy in assessing whether you have gotten the answer right—or wrong—might depend on the volume of gray matter in a certain part of your brain, according to a new...

By Josh Tapper, Guelph Mercury News August 10, 2010 Although adults older than 65 face challenges to body and brain, the 70s and 80s also bring an abundance of social and emotional knowledge, qualities scientists are beginning to define as wisdom. As Carstensen and another social psychologist, Fredda...

By Robert Ricco, Sara Schuyten Pierce and Connie Medinilla This study seeks to establish the relevance of middle school students’ naïve beliefs about knowledge and learning in science to their achievement motivation in this domain. A predominantly Hispanic and lower-income sample of 459 middle school...

Amid the unrest, dislocation, and uncertainty of seventeenth-century Europe, readers seeking consolation and assurance turned to philosophical and scientific books that offered ways of conquering fears and training the mind—guidance for living a good life. <i>The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution<...

By Valerie Tiberius At end the of July, 2010, a small group of philosophers and psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings, Minnesota to talk about wisdom. The workshop included five sessions. The first four sessions were organized around presentations by a philosopher and a psychologist on the...

Looking at the geographical distribution of natural disasters in the course of history, one might well wonder how earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires can take tragic human tolls, again and again, in the very same place . Why do people return to these vulnerable sites? Why are they unable...

In 1873, American poet John Godfrey Saxe published an English-language version of the philosophical fable about the blind men and the elephant. Touching various parts of the elephant, each of the blind men offered his own account of what the elephant was. The man near the trunk said it was like a snake;...

Here is a recently published article from Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics by Maxine Clarke entitled "Ethics of Science Communication on the Web." In it, the author argues that peer-reviewed journals remain the best means for scientists to communicate their results to one another...