Far from being a modern phenomenon, neurodivergence has a long history. In other words, people whose ways of thinking, sensing or behaving differed from social expectations have always existed. Members of my research project have described discovering these historical figures as like finding neurodivergent ancestors. - The Conversation
Students tend to have a low tolerance for fanciful hypotheses and abstruse thought experiments. All but the most philosophically inclined roll their eyes at Descartes’s famed “evil demon” scenario in which the reader is meant to reflect on whether any of her beliefs couldn’t have been presented as a deception of a malevolent spirit. - Hedgehog Review
When deciding how to make a word singular or plural, for instance, bilingual people exhibit strikingly similar brain activity regardless of whether they are speaking in their first or second language. - The New York Times
Research spanning 145 countries has identified a U-shaped happiness-age curve, whereby self-reported wellbeing tends to dip in mid-adulthood and peak in old age. - Psyche
From a marketing perspective, this approach blends internet culture and storytelling to create a memorable experience for fans. These teaser releases are particularly effective at generating fan theories, sparking speculation, creating memes and helping create stories with fans. - The Conversation
Understanding is a lively topic for philosophers, but not for the tech industry. In their race to the ultimate prize of AGI, Silicon Valley’s main players instead see the mechanization of reasoning as the main hurdle. For them, mathematics is the supreme AI challenge because it is the purest form of reasoning. - Boston Review
Habermas’s death might mark the end of a mode of main-stage philosophizing that, in the German-speaking world, reaches back, by way of Adorno, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Hegel, to Kant himself. - The New Yorker
This cockroach of forms—adaptive, resilient, unkillable—was named by the Roman dramatist Plautus in the second century BC, enjoyed its heyday in 17th-century Renaissance theater, and was revived in the 20th century to describe a slurry of existential despair and absurd farce. - ARTnews
Samuel Moyn argues that the oldest Americans, because of their retrograde politics and ever-increasing presence, are profoundly reshaping our collective life. - The New Yorker
Music has a unique capability to engage multiple areas of the brain that can function in sync with one another. This includes areas involved in hearing and listening, movement, attention, language, emotion, memory and thinking. - The Conversation
Reading a book involves a complex series of mental tasks. A reader must decode words, interpret pictures, and connect new information to what they already know. To do this efficiently, the human brain builds what scientists call a story schema. - Psypost
After WWII, “single-family homes spread across the nation like fireweed. In a distinctively American architectural feature, many of them were joined to a small dungeon dedicated to the tidy storage of automobiles—and other items.” - The Atlantic
Gatekeeper, here, doesn’t mean the patriarchal bogeyman of progressive fever dreams. It means the picky curator who maintains a necessary membrane between your half-formed, typo-addled thoughts and the wider world. It means the tastemaker who triages opinions and batters the better ones into readable form. - The Walrus
On one side are texts produced before the arrival of generative LLMs. On the other, everything that has followed—texts that might still be useful, even compelling, but that will always face a lingering suspicion of not being entirely human, of having been smoothed by systems trained to predict the word that comes next. - LA Review of Books
