Revelation comes in different forms for different people. A biblical verse. A flash of recognition in a lover’s eyes. A Nietzschean proverb. A classical sonata. A child’s embrace.…

Every physician remembers their first bad case. Mine went like this. One morning, a man came into our emergency department with back pain. He had recently undergone repair of an aortic…

People too often forget that IQ tests haven’t been around that long. Indeed, such psychological measures are only about a century old. Early versions appeared in France with the…

The great French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) took a particular interest in the origins of his own astonishing creativity. His achievements were impressive:…

Here is the predicament that most of us seem to be in. We are not virtuous people. We simply do not have characters that are good enough to qualify as honest, compassionate, wise,…

It is a good question, but I was a little surprised to see it as the title of a research paper in a medical journal: “How Happy Is Too Happy?” Yet there it was in a publication…

The list of off-the-charts young achievers associated, in retrospect, with Asperger’s syndrome extends a long way back. You may have heard that Bill Gates has been informally diagnosed…

Most poker players didn’t go to graduate school for cognitive linguistics. Then again, most poker players aren’t Annie Duke. After pursuing a psychology Ph.D. on childhood language…

Every emotion has a purpose—an evolutionary benefit,” says Sandi Mann, a psychologist and the author of The Upside of Downtime: Why Boredom Is Good. “I wanted to know why we…

The most effective monsters of horror fiction mirror ancestral dangers to exploit evolved human fears. Some fears are universal, some are near-universal, and some are local. The local…