Jim Davies
Why Your Brain Isn’t Into the Future
What you can’t imagine clearly, you value less.
The Chess Cheat in the 21st Century
If only the 18th-century hoaxer could see his “Mechanical Turk” now.
Don’t Give Up on Facts
People of all political stripes can spot misinformation. They just need a nudge.
AI Is Already Making Moral Choices for Us. Now What?
Delphi uses machine learning to tell us right from wrong—and much in between.
You Can Save More Animals by Donating $100 Than Going Vegan
By now everybody’s heard about the terrible treatment that pigs and chickens get in factory farms. For many, the solution seems obvious: eat less meat. But let’s look at that solution in terms of how effective it is. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the average American eats about 30 farm animals […]
Why AI Lags Behind the Human Brain in Computational Power
It might be more accurate to think of many of the brain’s 10 billion neurons as being deep networks, with five to eight layers in each one.
Weird Dreams Train Our Brains to Be Better Learners
For many of us over the last year and more, our waking experience has, you might say, lost a bit of its variety. We spend more time with the same people, in our homes, and go to fewer places. Our stimuli these days, in other words, aren’t very stimulating. Too much day-to-day routine, too much […]
Here’s Where Our Minds Sharpen in Old Age
Fluid intelligence has several aspects, and aging affects them differently.
Why Your Sleeping Brain Replays New Rewarding Experiences
It turned out that, yes, the participants’ brains revealed they were doing a kind of “neural replay” of the game they had been manipulated to win.Illustration by Kateryna Kon / Shutterstock During this Olympics, I’ve been rooting for Kelleigh Ryan, who is on the women’s foil team. She’s from Ottawa, where I live. Whenever she […]
New Evidence That Therapy Can Make You Happier
What are the interventions that are supposed to make us happier? What doesn’t work? And if something does work, how much good does it do?Pixabay In “All Eyes on Me,” a song from his new Netflix special Inside, the musician-comedian Bo Burnham pauses to ask, “You want to hear a funny story?” He tells us […]