Thinking

Humans are good visual thinkers, too, but we tend to privilege verbal thinking.

Adopting a healthy scepticism towards inherited ideas means “emptying the container of the Self.”

“It is more human to laugh at life than to lament it.”

Evil is easy to identify and fight against; not so with stupidity.

Give yourself (and others) a break.

“Once quantum mechanics is applied to the entire cosmos, it uncovers a three-thousand-year-old idea.”

“For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD.”

Computerized, job-focused learning undercuts the true value of higher education. Liberal arts should be our model for the future.

Hinduism emphasizes the journey, whichever path that takes. And it holds us responsible for our own self-improvement.

Education has a global bias against boys.

It was originally recorded in the 1970s by cognitive psychologists Harry McGurk and John MacDonald.

To the Greek philosopher, all of our actions ultimately aim at our own pleasure.

“Lethal autonomous weapon” sounds friendlier than “killer robot.”

If aliens are driven mostly by biological imperatives, humanity could be in big trouble if we ever meet technologically advanced beings.

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that we often don’t truly want to obtain what we think we desire.

Sight helps you see a room, but interoception lets you sense it from inside your own body.

Zen masters often have strikingly different ideas about how to live and attain enlightenment.

“Carpe diem” was only one part of Horace’s poem Odes 1.11.

The insanity of the academic job market laid out in numbers.

There is more consensus on what heaven looks like than hell.

A group of prominent scientists shares how research has changed them.

Buddhism has rules for slaying your enemies. But the real surprise is finding out who your enemies actually are.

Surely they can’t be worse…can they?

Mahāyāna is the most popular type of Buddhism in the world today.

There are different types of atheism and atheists. In general, they can be classified as the non-religious, the non-believers, and agnostics.

Being mortal makes life so much sweeter.

Historical analyses reveal that crises almost always yield surprising benefits.

Is science for everyone, or just the morally upright?

Foster your own moments of mystery.

By exposing people to small doses of misinformation and encouraging them to develop resistance strategies, “prebunking” can fight fake news.