Perception feels stable. Your sense of self feels solid. Yet neuroscientist Heather Berlin, psychologist Ethan Kross and neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explain that both are created by the brain. Through prediction, memory and neural pruning, the mind builds a narrative that feels coherent and fixed, even though modern science suggests that it’s continually shaped by pre-existing beliefs and experience. Seeing the construction clearly is the first step toward altering it.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
This video How your brain builds and edits your identity is featured on Big Think.
... Continue Reading »
If you were asked to think about a physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force in the Universe, what answer would you give? Most people, when asked, respond with one of two answers. Most people will give gravity as their answer: the attractive force between all objects with mass or energy. Alternatively, they’ll list any other force that occurs between atoms on Earth, all of which are some manifestation of the electromagnetic force. Either:
there’s an attractive force between two particles with mass-or-energy, as in gravitation,
or there’s an attractive or repulsive force between systems of charged particles either at rest or in motion, as in electromagnetism.
But those are only two of the four fundamental forces (at least, we think there are only four) known to physicists today. The other two forces, however, are arguably at least as important for creating the collections of matter and energy that exist in the Universe: the nuclear forces. After all, the nuclear forces are required to determine the atomic number of every atom: the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus. That’s the ... Continue Reading »
Marketers wake up every morning convinced nobody cares about what they’re selling. Most learning and development (L&D) pros assume the opposite, that attention comes with the job title, or at least with the mandatory completion requirement.
That gap explains a lot.
Mandatory Doesn’t Mean Engaged
Think about the last compliance course you clicked through. You showed up. You moved the slider. You passed the quiz. And three days later, you remembered almost nothing.
The training counted as “done.” Nobody asked whether it worked.
Marketers don’t get that grace period. If they lose your attention, they lose the sale, and they know it in real time. That pressure changes how they think. It should change how we think, too.
Relevance Is Rocket Fuel
The fastest path to attention is relevance. Not “here’s a module on communication skills.” Real relevance. The kind that makes someone think this was made for me.
That means knowing your audience before you build a single slide. What does their day actually look like? What problems grind them down? What language do they use when they talk about their work?
The more your content connects to ... Continue Reading »
Back in 1997, a joint venture between NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) was launched with the explicit purpose of studying the most distant naked eye planet of the Solar System: Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens mission, unlike the predecessor missions that visited Saturn — Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 — wasn’t simply a fly-by mission, but rather flew to Saturn with the intention of remaining there. After a seven year journey to get there, Cassini arrived, where it had many close encounters with Saturn’s rings, a large number of Saturn’s moons, and of course, the planet itself.
It didn’t just fly around Saturn, but rather above and below it as well, capturing views from 2004-2017 that maximized what we could learn about this prominent planet. One of the most surprising finds came early on in the mission, when the Cassini orbiter flew over the south pole of Saturn, and found something that had only ever been seen on Earth before: a hurricane with a well-defined eye wall to it. That was back in 2006, when Saturn’s south pole ... Continue Reading »
What makes us who we are? Most of us might say that it is our background that creates our identities: our families, where we’ve lived, how we were brought up and educated, the people who have influenced us, the jobs we’ve held. But there is something far more fundamental that makes us who we are, and which transcends social and cultural experiences. This is our brain. Our brains create us. No matter where you are from, where you live or have lived, the language you speak, the color of your skin, it is our brains that give us our identities.
In the past, some disagreed, arguing instead as Descartes did that our personal identity — our “self” — is separate from the brain. Most modern views, however, consider the brain to be the basis for all the experiences we have of our selves. Using new scanning techniques, some neuroscientists have even attempted to define the brain region where “the self” might reside. However, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett drily put it: “It is a category mistake to start looking around for ... Continue Reading »
In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar, and then traveled across North Africa. From Egypt, I followed the Nile all the way to its source in East Africa before making my way down to South Africa, which was still under apartheid at the time.
I was no newbie to hitchhiking. Since high school, I had hitched rides across the United States numerous times, traveling from coast to coast on many of the nation’s major interstate freeways. Hitching was also the main way I moved between my home in the Midwest and my university on the East Coast. I loved hitchhiking because it offered a fantastic way to get to know an amazing cross section of people from many different classes and races and walks of life. Hitching is particularly good at connecting you to those living ... Continue Reading »
Mary Beard uncovers the spectacle of the Ancient Roman parade, the Roman Triumph. Simultaneously a declaration of Roman supremacy and an admission that conquest may be theft at scale, these Roman propaganda events were so terrifying that Cleopatra famously chose death over appearing in one.
This video Rome’s triumph was the ancient world’s most effective piece of propaganda is featured on Big Think.
Continue Reading »
Out there in the vast depths of space, from our Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe, all sorts of objects can be found. There are enormous numbers of small bodies, from tiny moonlets to asteroids to comets and more, that simply aren’t massive enough to pull themselves into hydrostatic equilibrium. Beyond that, there are round planetary bodies — numerous moons, dwarf planets, and even rocky worlds themselves — that have enough mass to get that job done. At still higher masses, we find gas giant planets, brown dwarfs, and stars of all different colors, temperatures, and luminosities that will persist in shining for a wide variety of durations.
Once a star dies, there are a number of possible fates that can ensue as well, as a stellar corpse can remain as a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. And yet, throughout the entirety of this cosmic story, there’s just one parameter that overwhelmingly determines what type of object we’ll wind up with, as well as what properties it will possess: mass. In a straightforward fashion, ... Continue Reading »
Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed her grief following the sudden death of her husband in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.
The books on this list were basically written as propaganda. Their authors devised them to advance a particular ideology or party line, with the hope that readers would be persuaded to take up the cause. We’ll dive into why they were written, what ideology they promoted, and how effective they were at achieving their goals.
Before that, we should note that we aren’t using the term propaganda in a moral or artistic sense. We’re instead using it to describe works that place heavy emphasis on influencing readers through symbolism and emotional appeals. Whether they are narrative masterpieces or utter dreck, whether they conform to reality or distort it beyond recognition, and whether we agree or disagree isn’t the point. For these ... Continue Reading »
For 15 years now, the expanding Universe hasn’t added up.
This graph shows a comparison between the value of H0, or the expansion rate today, as derived from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheids and anchors as well as other subsamples of JWST Cepheids (or other types of stars) and anchors. A comparison to Planck, which uses the early relic method instead of the distance ladder method, is also shown. Very clearly, the distance ladder and early relic methods do not yield mutually compatible results.
Credit: A.G. Riess et al., Astrophysical Journal submitted, arXiv:2408.11770, 2024
Different measurement methods should converge on the same answer.
A large class of early relic methods, involving either the CMB and/or BAO (with a specific focus on DESI publications), all favor a Universe expanding at ~67 km/s/Mpc. Although there are a few groups that have outlier values for distance ladder measurements (including the CCHP group, shown as the second-from-bottom point), the strongest measurements, from the SH0ES and Pantheon+ collaborations, for instance, favor a value of ~73 km/s/Mpc, as shown here with smaller error bars. The two sets of values disagree at ... Continue Reading »
If you were asked to think about a physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force in the Universe, what answer would you give? Most people, when asked, respond with one of two answers. Most people will give gravity as their answer: the attractive force between all objects with mass or energy. Alternatively, they’ll list any other force that occurs between atoms on Earth, all of which are some manifestation of the electromagnetic force. Either:
there’s an attractive force between two particles with mass-or-energy, as in gravitation,
or there’s an attractive or repulsive force between systems of charged particles either at rest or in motion, as in electromagnetism.
But those are only two of the four fundamental forces (at least, we think there are only four) known to physicists today. The other two forces, however, are arguably at least as important for creating the collections of matter and energy that exist in the Universe: the nuclear forces. After all, the nuclear forces are required to determine the atomic number of every atom: the number of protons in an atom’s nucleus. That’s the ... 
Marketers wake up every morning convinced nobody cares about what they’re selling. Most learning and development (L&D) pros assume the opposite, that attention comes with the job title, or at least with the mandatory completion requirement.
That gap explains a lot.
Mandatory Doesn’t Mean Engaged
Think about the last compliance course you clicked through. You showed up. You moved the slider. You passed the quiz. And three days later, you remembered almost nothing.
The training counted as “done.” Nobody asked whether it worked.
Marketers don’t get that grace period. If they lose your attention, they lose the sale, and they know it in real time. That pressure changes how they think. It should change how we think, too.
Relevance Is Rocket Fuel
The fastest path to attention is relevance. Not “here’s a module on communication skills.” Real relevance. The kind that makes someone think this was made for me.
That means knowing your audience before you build a single slide. What does their day actually look like? What problems grind them down? What language do they use when they talk about their work?
The more your content connects to ... 
Back in 1997, a joint venture between NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) was launched with the explicit purpose of studying the most distant naked eye planet of the Solar System: Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens mission, unlike the predecessor missions that visited Saturn — Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, and Voyager 2 — wasn’t simply a fly-by mission, but rather flew to Saturn with the intention of remaining there. After a seven year journey to get there, Cassini arrived, where it had many close encounters with Saturn’s rings, a large number of Saturn’s moons, and of course, the planet itself.
It didn’t just fly around Saturn, but rather above and below it as well, capturing views from 2004-2017 that maximized what we could learn about this prominent planet. One of the most surprising finds came early on in the mission, when the Cassini orbiter flew over the south pole of Saturn, and found something that had only ever been seen on Earth before: a hurricane with a well-defined eye wall to it. That was back in 2006, when Saturn’s south pole ... 
What makes us who we are? Most of us might say that it is our background that creates our identities: our families, where we’ve lived, how we were brought up and educated, the people who have influenced us, the jobs we’ve held. But there is something far more fundamental that makes us who we are, and which transcends social and cultural experiences. This is our brain. Our brains create us. No matter where you are from, where you live or have lived, the language you speak, the color of your skin, it is our brains that give us our identities.
In the past, some disagreed, arguing instead as Descartes did that our personal identity — our “self” — is separate from the brain. Most modern views, however, consider the brain to be the basis for all the experiences we have of our selves. Using new scanning techniques, some neuroscientists have even attempted to define the brain region where “the self” might reside. However, as the philosopher Daniel Dennett drily put it: “It is a category mistake to start looking around for ... 
In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of Gibraltar, and then traveled across North Africa. From Egypt, I followed the Nile all the way to its source in East Africa before making my way down to South Africa, which was still under apartheid at the time.
I was no newbie to hitchhiking. Since high school, I had hitched rides across the United States numerous times, traveling from coast to coast on many of the nation’s major interstate freeways. Hitching was also the main way I moved between my home in the Midwest and my university on the East Coast. I loved hitchhiking because it offered a fantastic way to get to know an amazing cross section of people from many different classes and races and walks of life. Hitching is particularly good at connecting you to those living ... 
Out there in the vast depths of space, from our Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe, all sorts of objects can be found. There are enormous numbers of small bodies, from tiny moonlets to asteroids to comets and more, that simply aren’t massive enough to pull themselves into hydrostatic equilibrium. Beyond that, there are round planetary bodies — numerous moons, dwarf planets, and even rocky worlds themselves — that have enough mass to get that job done. At still higher masses, we find gas giant planets, brown dwarfs, and stars of all different colors, temperatures, and luminosities that will persist in shining for a wide variety of durations.
Once a star dies, there are a number of possible fates that can ensue as well, as a stellar corpse can remain as a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. And yet, throughout the entirety of this cosmic story, there’s just one parameter that overwhelmingly determines what type of object we’ll wind up with, as well as what properties it will possess: mass. In a straightforward fashion, ... 
Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed her grief following the sudden death of her husband in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking.
The books on this list were basically written as propaganda. Their authors devised them to advance a particular ideology or party line, with the hope that readers would be persuaded to take up the cause. We’ll dive into why they were written, what ideology they promoted, and how effective they were at achieving their goals.
Before that, we should note that we aren’t using the term propaganda in a moral or artistic sense. We’re instead using it to describe works that place heavy emphasis on influencing readers through symbolism and emotional appeals. Whether they are narrative masterpieces or utter dreck, whether they conform to reality or distort it beyond recognition, and whether we agree or disagree isn’t the point. For these ... 
For 15 years now, the expanding Universe hasn’t added up.
This graph shows a comparison between the value of H0, or the expansion rate today, as derived from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheids and anchors as well as other subsamples of JWST Cepheids (or other types of stars) and anchors. A comparison to Planck, which uses the early relic method instead of the distance ladder method, is also shown. Very clearly, the distance ladder and early relic methods do not yield mutually compatible results.
Credit: A.G. Riess et al., Astrophysical Journal submitted, arXiv:2408.11770, 2024
Different measurement methods should converge on the same answer.
A large class of early relic methods, involving either the CMB and/or BAO (with a specific focus on DESI publications), all favor a Universe expanding at ~67 km/s/Mpc. Although there are a few groups that have outlier values for distance ladder measurements (including the CCHP group, shown as the second-from-bottom point), the strongest measurements, from the SH0ES and Pantheon+ collaborations, for instance, favor a value of ~73 km/s/Mpc, as shown here with smaller error bars. The two sets of values disagree at ...