Jim Davies
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. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . According to data from the […]
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 Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . During this Olympics, I’ve been rooting for Kelleigh Ryan, who is on […]
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 Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . In “All Eyes on Me,” a song from his new Netflix special Inside, the musician-comedian Bo Burnham pauses […]
Do We Have Free Will? Maybe It Doesn’t Matter
Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, eloquently claims as much in his recent book Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being. It’s the “most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity humanity has evolved,” he writes, the power to “see and feel […]
What If You Could Describe Your Dreams While Dreaming?
The potential to hack our dreams opens a new frontier for mental research.
This Is How Your Brain Walks the Dog—a Dialogue
Habits: You two were arguing, I just kept walking. Felt like the right thing to do.Photograph by evrymmnt / Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . INT. HOME OFFICE—DAYBODY, a middle-aged woman, is working at a computer, trying to finish a plan for the household budget.Habits ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members […]