In fairy tales the hero finds his bride and brings her home; the heroine walks to her husband and stays. A folklorist reads the pattern as an old marriage custom.
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Why does the stepmother torment the heroine? A folklorist's quick answer: she came from far away, and her own daughter had to marry too.
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Send Little Red Riding Hood from Bordeaux toward Russia and her basket changes at every border. A folklorist explains where a fairy tale keeps its nationality.
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A smartphone can hold every grandmaster chess game ever played. A psychologist argues that human limits, not limitless knowledge, are where creativity begins.
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A psychologist explains the morphological box: split a messy problem into parts, lay them on a grid, and see options you would not have thought of.
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A psychologist explains why memory is a byproduct of thinking, and why handing an essay to AI means you remember almost nothing of it.
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Max Talanov, a neural network researcher, wants a brain-to-brain link that passes on neuromodulator levels, so we could finally feel what another person feels.
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A hungry rabbit, two pedals and a cell that fires for "any pedal". Konstantin Anokhin on how neurons build red, chairs and people that physics doesn't contain.
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A brain scientist argues that we exist only at the level of consciousness. In dreamless sleep, a faint or under anesthesia, he says, you are simply not there.
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Your hunger is old, but your route to the canteen is new. Konstantin Anokhin on how the brain grows a personal tree of systems, one failed plan at a time.
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Neurobiologist Olga Ivashkina on why one breakfast in Japan stays sharp while a month of ordinary mornings melts into a single "typical breakfast".
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A man who forgot his nurse within minutes could still learn a hard new skill. Neurobiologist Olga Ivashkina on why skills and life events live in separate networks.
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