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 small set of sounds that produce a physical reaction in nearly everybody who hears them — a wince, a shudder, a reflex to cover the ears —…
There is a class of behaviour that everybody performs, everybody recognises, nobody controls and nobody can explain, and yawning is the most conspicuous member of it.
It occurs in essentially…
There is a reported experience so widespread that it barely gets questioned, and the questioning is where it becomes interesting.
The experience is that time accelerates. A childhood summer was…
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 a phrase that gets used dismissively — that something is just a placebo — and it carries an assumption worth examining.
The assumption is that a placebo response…