There is a specific social awkwardness that everybody has encountered from one side and nobody from both.
Visiting an unfamiliar house, you register its smell immediately — not unpleasant necessarily,…
Almost everything strange about smell follows from two facts: it is chemistry rather than physics, and it takes an unusually direct route into the brain. Here are twelve consequences.
1.…
There is a particular kind of double-take that everyone has experienced. A washing machine looks startled. A car in a car park appears smug. A pattern in wood grain resolves,…
The useful way to think about vision is not as a recording but as a reconstruction — a best guess assembled from partial data. Here are twelve of the shortcuts…
Try it. Run your fingers along your own ribs, or the sole of your own foot, using exactly the motion that would reduce you to helpless laughter if somebody else…
Ask an adult for their earliest memory and you will usually get something from around the age of three or four: a first day at preschool, the arrival of a…