The Default Mode Network and the Wandering Self
When the mind is given nothing to do, it turns inward. A look at the brain's most mysterious resting state — and why it may be the seat of selfhood.
The LabMirror Neurons and the Architecture of Empathy
The neurons that fire when we watch someone else act. What they tell us about connection — and why the story turned out to be far more complicated than the headlines suggested.
Field NotesThe Languages That Shape What We Can Feel
If you don't have a word for an emotion, can you still feel it? Dispatches from the borderlands of language, culture, and inner life.
Essays · CoverI Am Not the Same Person I Was Ten Years Ago. Am I?
On continuity of self, the Ship of Theseus, and what neuroscience and philosophy have to say about whether the person who made your past decisions is still you.
The LabThe False Memory Factory
Memory is not a recording. It is a reconstruction. Every time you remember something, you change it — a little or a lot. Here is what that means for who you think you are.
CultureCollective Identity and the Myth of the Individual
Western psychology built a self that stands alone. But for most of human history — and most of the world today — the self is inseparable from the group. Who was right?
ConversationsFree Will, Determinism, and the Feeling of Agency
A philosopher and a neuroscientist sit across from each other with the oldest question. Neither wins, and that turns out to be the point.
EssaysOn Being Called a Foreigner in My Own Country
What happens to your sense of self when the place that made you refuses to claim you? A personal reckoning with belonging and the violence of belonging's absence.
CultureWhat Instagram Did to How We Present Ourselves
Erving Goffman said we are all performing. He could not have imagined the audience we perform for now. On self-presentation, the curated life, and what we lose in the editing.
The LabThe Neuroscience of Code-Switching
Switching between languages is not just a linguistic act — it is a cognitive and emotional one. What the bilingual brain reveals about the multiplicity of the self.
EssaysWriting in a Second Language, Thinking in a Third
Every language I write in changes what I am able to say. On translation, self-betrayal, and the strange gift of not quite belonging to any tongue.
ConversationsA Conversation with Anil Seth on Consciousness
The neuroscientist behind the "controlled hallucination" theory of perception talks about what it means to be a self, why consciousness is not what you think, and why that is wonderful.