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As humans, we instinctively understand that time has profound worth, regardless of any workplace benefits. This is what sabbatical alumni mean when they ascribe a feeling of humanity to their time off. Unfortunately, the burden of proof for many is to somehow provide an equation of increased productivity. While this misses the point of what taking time off is all about, there is a lens from psychology that can help us understand the benefits in more tangible terms: conservation of resources theo

If you spend any time on the artsy and philosophical side of social media (of which I am a proud denizen), you will eventually stumble upon some nostalgia-made-cool. I am as guilty as the rest. Because English has only a few words for nostalgia-adjacent emotions — like heartache, homesickness, or sorrow — English speakers tend to grasp thirstily for what other languages have to say. And other languages certainly seem to have richer accounts of a complex emotion. In Portuguese, you have “ saudade

Psychologist Paul Bloom explains why morality, the thing that makes cooperation and trust possible, is also what drives cruelty, cycles of revenge, and wars where both sides believe they’re the moral ones. This video The psychology of revenge, in 19 minutes is featured on Big Think .

There are a lot of people who think they know what science is, what science tells us, and how to evaluate claims based on their scientific merits. But are their assessments accurate? How do you, yourself, conceive of science? Do you do what most people do, and default to what you learned about science across a variety of classes in school, with a layer of cynicism and skepticism layered atop it? That’s understandable, as many of us remember being taught “facts” in our science classes that later

I have struggled to set goals for most of my life. I’ve wondered for a while what they actually do for me. When I was younger, my dad had us write down big, ambitious, long-term goals. I still have some of those handwritten notes. Two of them were: 1. Earn a college scholarship for academics or athletics. 2. After college, get a job that I actually like instead of just worrying about money. Both came true. So, here’s a reasonable question: Did they happen because I wrote them down? Or because I

From writing ‘Cop Killer’ to playing a cop on SVU , ICE-T is no stranger to personal evolution. After losing both parents by seventh grade, he was sent to Los Angeles, where he learned to survive without a family. Here, he hustled for money and respect until rap gave him another route. Eventually, acting opened another path, forcing him to step outside the persona he built to protect himself. Now, in his late 60s, he understands that the chaos of his early life existed to propel him forward, and

During most times of the year, when you look up at a dark, clear night sky, the stars, planets, and perhaps the Moon shine brightly, along with, if you’re lucky, a view of the plane of the Milky Way. As far as objects moving through the sky go, you’re usually far more likely to see things with artificial lights, like airplanes or satellites, than you are meteors. Across the entire sky, during most times of the year, you’re lucky if you can spot 2 or 3 meteors per hour: caused by random pieces of

After fracturing my humerus in an arm-wrestling match, something happened that I wasn’t prepared for. For the first time in my life, I lost the ability to exercise; the one thing that had always anchored my mental health. My mood began to unravel. The only solutions I knew were the ones I’d been taught in medical school: therapy or medication. My experience isn’t unique; it reflects a much larger problem in how we currently treat depression. An estimated 1.17 billion people live with a mental di

Out there in the Universe, a similar cosmic story plays out time and time again: the stellar life cycles. A massive, cold cloud of gaseous material, under the power of its own self-gravitation, begins to contract. As clumps within that gas get denser, the cloud fragments, with each fragment collapsing on its way to become a protostar. The most massive and dense clumps, initially, attract surrounding matter the fastest, growing into the most massive of these new stars, where around 50% of all suc

Low-agency people tend to believe in what I call the “myth of willpower,” the idea that virtue lies in exerting extreme effort to overcome obstacles. This is different from putting on a show of effort to impress others or to cover your ass. This is about truly believing that success attained without effort is actually bad, bordering on immoral. You can see this in the discourse around Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs, in the way some people insist on shaming those who “cheat” at weight loss i

Stephen Wolfram — physicist and creator of Wolfram Alpha — has spent decades trying to understand why the universe produces so much complexity from such simple beginnings. His answer? The same principle that drives biological evolution, shapes living tissue, and determines how organisms grow turns out to be a fundamental property of computation itself. Nature isn’t random and it isn’t engineered. It’s something stranger and more elegant than either. This video The universe isn’t random – it’s so

Albert Einstein is one of a handful of scientific minds in history who made profound mental leaps that arguably no other researcher could have achieved during their era. There just wasn’t sufficient scientific data to motivate anyone else to come up with Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity (though some came close ). In fact, the core principles of relativity are counterintuitive to minds that evolved here on Earth, where objects move slowly, gravity feels like a force, and time

“What do you want?” might be one of the hardest questions for humans to answer. Not at the drive-thru or cafe — if you’re in line in front of me, you better have your order locked and loaded or I’ll be speaking to your parents, who I know raised you better. My performance coach, Lauren, is constantly asking me various versions of “What do you want?” She fires short, seemingly simple questions from the hip, leaving me confused before I eventually ramble and stumble into something I didn’t even kn

Today, life on Earth is highly evolved, diverse, and complex. This tree of life illustrates the evolution and development of the various organisms on Earth. Although we all emerged from a common ancestor more than 2 billion years ago, the diverse forms of life emerged from a chaotic process that would not be exactly repeated even if we rewound and re-ran the clock trillions of times. As first realized by Darwin, many hundreds of millions, if not billions, of years were required to explain the di