Big Think

I first met Eduardo during my last year of neurology residency, in our aging and memory clinic. He was 56 years old and in robust physical health, having been an avid cyclist for much of his life. But he had a bookish side, too: He was an enthusiastic reader of history and led an informal book club that met monthly at his apartment. As a Dominican American, he was particularl...

It doesn’t take Jack Nicholson tap, tap, tapping away in an empty hotel to tell you that rest is important to our well-being. Physiologically, humans need to rest and sleep. When we don’t, we lose some of our ability to concentrate, calculate, remember, and even perceive the world accurately. Our muscles cannot repair, our energy stores deplete, and our hearts beat faster.

Why does love make rational people obsessive? Meghan Sullivan, PhD, Helen Fisher, PhD, Gail Saltz, PhD, and Ted Fischer, PhD, trace love through the brain systems that shape reward, stress, attachment, and desire. But chemistry is only the beginning. Love may also be a moral practice: a way to pay attention, challenge bias, and ask what it really means to care.

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We treat focus as something you’re either engaging in, or opting out of, but what if the truth points to focus as being something you’ve been trained out of by our attention economy?

David Epstein, author of Range and Inside the Box, breaks down what’s actually happening inside the brain when we multitask, and why “just focusing” is a solution that doesn’t hold up to...

It’s easy to think about the idea of a singularity — where a large amount of matter and energy gets compressed into a single spacetime point or event — and dismiss it as a pathology. After all, everything that we know of in physics, at a fundamental level, comes in quantized little bits: particles and antiparticles with a fixed, finite amount of energy inherent to each of the...