The Best of MIT Press

In order to preserve nihilism as a meaningful concept, it's necessary to distinguish it from pessimism, cynicism, and apathy.

An excerpt from “Memory,” a primer on human memory, its workings, feats, and flaws, by two leading psychological researchers.

Psycholinguist Giosuè Baggio sheds light on the thrilling, evolving field of neurolinguistics, where neuroscience and linguistics meet.

Drawing on a wealth of personal accounts found in magazines, newsletters, and trade journals, historian Kristen Haring provides an inside look at ham radio culture and its impact on hobbyists' lives.

The author of “Whiteness” traces the evolution of race as a social and political instrument, from its beginnings in ancient hierarchies through European colonial expansion and into contemporary times.

An excerpt from "Beyond the Self: Conversations between Buddhism and Neuroscience."

Cognitive psychologist and poet Keith Holyoak explores whether artificial intelligence could ever achieve poetic authenticity.

An excerpt from veteran game designer Greg Costikyan's book "Uncertainty in Games."

«Unless you have lived in a Skinner box from an ear»

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.

There is more to running than just training your muscles and improving your stamina. It is also a mental sport, and maybe even more so than previously believed.

«In his opinion, what runners refer to as exhaustion has nothing to do with their physical ability to carry on or not. It is simply a matter of deciding to give up.»

There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking.

«Albert Einstein once noted that “intuition is nothing but the outcome of earlier intellectual experience.”»

The quantification of bodies, senses, and experience did not begin with surveillance capitalism but can be traced back to mathematical and statistical techniques of the 19th century.

«Emerging experimental psychology laboratories wanted to create a new kind of human being: quantifiable, calculable, and predictable.»

Huxley was a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness, which he actively cultivated in the service of his writing.

Plato's cave metaphor illustrates the cognitive trap of ignorance, where we may be unaware of the limitations of our understanding.

Rhythm plays an important role in how we perceive — and connect with — the world.

«There are multiple rhythmic intelligences. You cannot predict how someone will perform one rhythm task by how they perform a different rhythm task.»

Responsible design thinking demands a balance between creating solutions and anticipating their future consequences.

Left unchecked, the technique, which weaponizes emotional data for political gain, could erode the foundations of a fair and informed society.