Karl Friston wanted me to know he had plenty of time. That wasn’t quite true. He just didn’t want our conversation—about his passion, the physics of mental life—to end. Once…

In the bowels of an animal research facility at Oxford University, mice are stirring in cages. Half of them have been given an injection of saline solution and behave like the docile…

It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share.…

On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding…

In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies and a beaming, blue-green sea. He had already…

In wondering what can be done to steer civilization away from the abyss, I confess to being increasingly puzzled by the central enigma of contemporary cognitive psychology: To what…

The contrast could not have been starker—here was one of the world’s most revered figures, His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, expressing his belief that all life is sentient,…

Can you imagine a mind without language? More specifically, can you imagine your mind without language? Can you think, plan, or relate to other people if you lack words to help structure…

In Samuel Beckett’s novel, The Unnamable, the anonymous narrator laments, “I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their setting, no…

The other day I fixed something—a rarity for me. The flotation device in the toilet water tank was rubbing against the side, getting stuck halfway up so that the tank didn’t fill…