Browsing: Lens_ideas

Exposing the reasons we fail to understand the minds of others.

The more we convince ourselves that we don’t have certain biases, the more likely we are to exhibit them.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal recorded his dreams to prove Freud wrong.

An exclusive look at the dreams Santiago Ramon y Cajal recorded to prove Freud was wrong.

Are people are more likely to act less emotionally and more rationally when speaking their second language?

There was a place in Iowa in 1995, tucked away in the dark-green fields of soybeans and corn, where a flooded rock quarry shimmered aquamarine. I stood on its edge one hot summer day with two friends. Like most teenagers, we were drawn to the rebelliousness of it. To get there, we had to trespass […]

As a philosopher who studies the meaning of color, Mazviita Chirimuuta is well aware that philosophy can easily get stuck on that topic. In her recent book, Outside Color, Chirimuuta tries to move beyond one of the major hang-ups when thinking about color, arguing that the property should be defined not by the world outside or inside […]

An argument for a new definition of color.

Now that New Horizons has completed its flyby of Pluto, the spacecraft is on a long journey to become the fifth manmade object to leave the solar system. It does so carrying some curious human artifacts: a Florida state quarter, an American flag, and one ounce of the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto […]

Why does the color we associate with wholesome things like bananas, sunshine, and honeybees—“the color of hope, joy, and optimism,” according to one of the world’s foremost color experts—also signify the creeping presence of illness and death? Not death in the abstract: the dark-cloaked, scythe-brandishing spirit of Victorian art, or the symbolic black vestments worn […]