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A childhood spent under the spell of sleight-of-hand taught me skepticism, curiosity, and the habit of looking beneath appearances.
"Ultimately, the choice rests with each individual: whether to take the convenient route of allowing AI to handle our critical thinking, or to preserve this essential cognitive process for ourselves."
Philosophers rarely change their minds. These thinkers did — often at social and professional cost.
How many stupid acts does it take to make a person stupid?
What a 1950s experiment reveals about conformity in the age of the internet.
When a word comes to mean everything, it means nothing.
Real understanding, argues Jeff DeGraff, doesn’t come from outputs — it comes from practice.
Arendt thought 20th-century philosophy had become too passive and abstract. She called for "active thinking" that prepares us to live in the real world.
When appraising human behavior, people tend to forgo the lessons of psychology in favor of assumption and anecdote.
The latest from Peter Leyden's "The Great Progression: 2025 to 2050", an essay series published by Freethink.
Plato's cave metaphor illustrates the cognitive trap of ignorance, where we may be unaware of the limitations of our understanding.
Metacognition — the ability to think about your thinking — can help you learn faster and make better decisions.
"For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD."
Astronomer Adam Frank reflects on some responses to his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast.
Many top performers start behind — and overtake the early leaders later.
Reading isn’t just writing prep; together, reading and writing help writers think and generate original ideas through extended cognition.
A tour of the literary cover-ups, extraterrestrials, and cryptids lurking in the bookish backwoods.
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Philosopher Daniel Dennett offers time-tested techniques from philosophy and cognitive science to help navigate modern challenges like "fake news" and AI, emphasizing the importance of inquiry and critical thinking in uncovering the truth.
"We are racing towards a new era in which we outsource cognitive abilities that are central to our identity as thinking beings," writes computer scientist Louis Rosenberg.
A brief guide to habits that separate deep understanding from superficial knowledge — and how to cultivate them.
Participants’ brains revealed they were doing a kind of “neural replay” of the game they had been manipulated to win.
Changing the narrative on false memories might be surprisingly simple.
Alex Edmans, professor of finance at the London Business School, warns us to be mindful of the incentives surrounding misinformation — including our desire to believe it.
New evidence suggests the corvid family has surprising mental abilities.
The late philosopher suggested adding a couple of “Occam’s heuristics” to your critical thinking toolbox.
Grandmasters and drug dealers have one thing in common: They are many steps ahead of their rivals.
A new framework describes how thought arises from the coordination of neural activity driven by oscillating electric fields — a.k.a. brain “waves” or “rhythms.”
The tech world’s fixation on artificial intelligence has spawned beliefs and rituals that resemble religion — complete with digital deities, moral codes, and threats of damnation.
“It is natural to want to avoid failure. But when we avoid failure, we also avoid discovery and accomplishment."
I'm definitely a Kitsune, but would a Kitsune actually say that?