Social life
A city has no brain, yet it can produce ideas that no single person planned. By shaping whom we meet and how knowledge moves, cities change how we think together. Perhaps urban intelligence lies not inside the city, but in the connections it creates.
Some brains hear words and sense the emotional pressure behind them before language has fully caught up. Maybe high sensitivity is not a weakness, but an early warning system for the invisible weather of a room.
Imagine someone offers to split €10 with you but keeps €8 for themselves and gives you only €2. Most people would see that as unfair. Now imagine two different people making this offer. One person is usually generous. The other person is known for being selfish. Even though they both offer the same split, it feels different, doesn’t it?
Why does one person feel completely exhausted after being in a busy place, while another barely notices it? Why is one person deeply moved by a sad movie or quick to notice small details, while another hardly reacts? According to researchers, this has to do with how our brain processes sensory input. It can be explained with the ideas of predictive processing.
Being highly sensitive and having a high level of sensation-seeking may feel like living life with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake – but this paradox can be your greatest strength. When you accept and respect both sides, highly sensitive sensation seekers can truly thrive.
Scroll through any social media feed and you’ll find people sharing their highs and lows, sometimes openly, sometimes between the lines. For years, researchers have hoped that artificial intelligence (AI) could learn to recognize early signs of depression from our words. The idea is simple and powerful: if language carries emotional fingerprints, algorithms might one day detect distress before it becomes a crisis.
But what if these systems end up hearing some experiences more clearly than others?
From the moment you are born, you live in one body. This body grounds your perspective: you see, hear, and feel the world from this single point of view. Yet this also means you are stuck inside it. You can never truly know what it is like to be someone else. Or can you? With a few clever tricks, your brain can be persuaded that you have stepped into another body. This is the body-swap illusion.
“Humans are social animals” is an understatement. In this blog, we dive into why humans are super-social animals and why we need to study the human brain beyond the individual and in the context of the culture that has evolved it.
Were you called a genius, visionary, or brilliant by an LLM (large language model) based on the last idea you discussed with it? But deep down, you know that the idea was half-baked and needed major refinement? The over-the-top ego massage may lead to an egoistic society. Read further to know why and how to stop it.
Love takes on many shapes and forms; it can move mountains, remain unrequited, or last a lifetime. It has the power to make us feel like the happiest person in the world, but also the saddest. Arguably the most powerful emotion of all, love can largely be explained by what happens in our brains. But can it really be reduced to biochemical signals?