Jim Davies

It can seem like a Catch-22 is baked into the practice of meditation. It’s meant, among other things, to foster patience—but meditation also seems to require considerable patience to work. Or at least “mindfulness meditation” does. (There are many ways to meditate; the practice isn’t monolithic.) When I began to toy with it several years […]

Game designers can make players reflect on their moral decisions in a way other art forms can’t.

Moral luck isn’t just a philosopher’s toy concept. It’s reflected in our legal system. Suppose that you and your roommate, Riley, get equally drunk and both drive home separately on similar routes. Let’s say both of you are equally skilled drivers but also equally impaired, and just by chance, you kill somebody crossing the street […]

Testosterone gets a pretty bad reputation. It’s been long known as the hormone of aggression. In his 1998 book, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky writes, “What evidence links testosterone with aggression? Some pretty obvious stuff”: Males tend to have more testosterone than […]

In Jasper Fforde’s lighthearted “Thursday Next” series of books, people can use a “prose portal” to enter the world of a book, to change the plot or kidnap a character. The prose portal is an imaginative metaphor for a familiar experience: feeling taken away by a narrative, sucked into a good book so that we […]

What does it mean to have an emotion? It seems obvious that having one means feeling it. If you’re happy but don’t know it, in what sense could you actually be happy? Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Such reasoning seemed sound to William James. Conscious feeling, he thought, […]

I bet when you woke up this morning, even before you opened your eyes, you knew where all of your limbs were. You didn’t have to look at, or try moving them, to feel their presence. This is because you have the power of proprioception (it’s also sometimes called “kinesthesis”). Because it’s a sense, just […]

Once, I dreamed I was at a man’s funeral. According to the deceased’s instructions, each of his toes were to be buried in tiny, individual coffins. When I woke up, I wondered, “What could it mean?” Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . According to some neuroscience research on dreams, […]

Aren’t you positively brimming with joy, now that winter has gone? No? Me neither. Yet several months ago, I couldn’t wait for the Ottawa snow to melt and spring to start. Now that it’s here, though, I can’t really tell what I thought was so exciting. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or […]

Imagine that, for once just for kicks, you decided to play the lottery and, not long after, you saw that the winning numbers were yours. You’re now millions of dollars richer. Do you think you’d be happier? Most of us think so. Now imagine that, instead of winning the lottery, you got into an accident […]