In nature, business, and life, survival doesn’t belong to the optimized — it belongs to those with a built-in buffer.

Locked inside their minds, thousands await a cure. Neuroscientist Daniel Toker is racing to find it.

"Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life, where you're making choices in accord with what you actually want and going where you actually wanna go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions."

Surprisingly, multimodal large language models struggle to read time on analog clocks.

A look inside Mindstate Design Labs' effort to design drugs that reliably produce specific states of mind.

What can drugs teach us about consciousness?

Our brains cling to the bad. This method could help balance the scales.

A powerful psychedelic long used in African rituals shows surprising promise for treating traumatic brain injury and PTSD.

"We try to stick to routines and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process. There is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved."

A fresh view of intelligence — spanning living systems from bacteria to human civilization — challenges the idea that it’s merely problem-solving.

"Everything that we care about, everything we experience, everything we know, we know it through our conscious awareness of it."

The nature of “the mind” is always vast and clear no matter how swamped by information we feel — and leaders can learn to embrace this space.

"Personality isn't based on what we say we'll do. It's rooted in what we actually do, which becomes what we think about."

Cognitive neuroscientist and AI researcher Christopher Summerfield explores the differences, and similarities, of how AI and humans make meaning of the world.

Memory takes effort, and our brains know it.

When plans fall apart, adaptability can build something better.

“Can we push these cells to do something other than what they normally do?" asks developmental biologist Michael Levin. "Can they build something completely different?”

Neuroscientist and author Anne-Laure Le Cunff discusses the lasting benefits of uncertainty, curiosity, and the experimental mindset.

Delirium is one of the most perplexing deathbed phenomena, exposing the gap between our cultural ideals of dying words and the reality of a disoriented mind.

Could AI develop true intelligence without sentience? Philosopher Jonathan Birch explores the boundaries of artificial and evolved minds.

Ethan Kross, psychologist and author of "Shift," explains how negative emotions help us live safely and well.

"The amount of interest is enormous," says anesthesiologist Boris Heifets. "People are dropping in and coming out of the woodwork, trying to understand how to do this."

New research is uncovering why we eat first with our expectations.

"I think it's about time we stop allowing every male generation bang their frontal lobe through its most developmental stages."

“Many people get stuck in feeling responsible for their psychological state, and there's a way in which simply being with whatever uncomfortable emotions rather than believing that you are controlling them can be extremely beneficial for psychological wellbeing.”

Hawking’s refusal to upgrade his communication system preserved a voice that became iconic, not just for its sound, but for the profound identity it conveyed.

Participants’ brains revealed they were doing a kind of “neural replay” of the game they had been manipulated to win.

Welcome to The Nightcrawler — a weekly newsletter from Eric Markowitz covering tech, innovation, and long-term thinking.

"We do not experience primarily because we have brains; we experience because we are alive."

Just because you can't experience it doesn't mean it's not real.