The idea for a tool to probe the basis of consciousness came to Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. while shaving. “It just occurred to me,” he says, “wouldn’t it be interesting to see if…

On an evening in January A.D. 532, pandemonium broke out in the Constantinople Hippodrome, a U-shaped chariot racetrack surrounded by stadium stands. Two factions, the Greens and Blues—the…

Animals like to hoard. Christopher E. Overtree, director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a specialist in treating hoarding, says…

How long is now? According to Google, not much less than 250 milliseconds. In 2008, the company presented a research report that examined ideal “latency” times for search results.…

The British philosopher Derek Parfit espoused a severely reductionist view of personal identity in his seminal book, Reasons and Persons: It does not exist, at least not in the way…

Suppose a woman suffering a headache blames it on a car accident she had. Her story is plausible at first, but on closer examination it has flaws. She says the car accident happened…

When Ruth Behar moved from Cuba to Israel and then to a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, New York, in 1962, she was shunted into the “dumb class.” There she met another challenged…

Our interactions with home are intimate, sustained, complex, and even physiological. We react to them not just with our rational mind, and our emotions, but also with our bodies. To…

When I returned to England, I knew that Antarctica had distorted my personality. The rolling green hills of Derbyshire, near where I grew up, looked different than I recalled. At a…

A few months ago, I conducted an early Thanksgiving experiment on myself. I was in Reykjavik, Iceland, on a lecture trip. My morning was free, and I took it to write two pages about…