There is a useful way of framing biological questions that makes familiar things strange, and sleep is the clearest case.
The framing is to ask what a trait costs, and…
Face recognition feels like a single ability that everybody has, working roughly the same way in everybody.
That impression is wrong in the way most impressions about internal experience are…
There is a category of human variation that is essentially invisible, because it concerns something nobody can observe in anybody else and nobody has reason to compare.
Ask two people…
There is an assumption that things used routinely are understood, and it does not hold in general.
A great many effective interventions were established empirically — somebody noticed that something…
Most reported mental phenomena are difficult to study because they cannot be produced on demand, and this one is the extreme case.
It occurs unpredictably, lasts a few seconds, cannot…
There is a category of everyday experience so ordinary that nobody thinks to ask about it, and this is a good example.
Something itches. You scratch. It stops, briefly, and…