Articles About cognitive science

Pattern separation is how the hippocampus keeps near identical days from collapsing into one blur, and why the human evidence is still fiercely argued.

Boredom is not empty time. It is what the brain does when attention cannot find anywhere to land, and the science behind it is stranger than it looks.

The Google effect is real but modest, and its most famous experiment failed to replicate twice. Here is what the evidence actually supports.

Aphantasia is the absence of voluntary mental imagery. Research now shows what memory does instead, and why a blank mind's eye is not a weak memory.

How a patch of visual cortex that never evolved for letters became the brain's reading engine, and why neuroscientists still argue about what it really does.

Subitizing is the mind's instant grasp of small quantities. The science of why four is the ceiling, and what a century of experiments still cannot settle.

A sedative dose of midazolam leaves you awake, talking and solving problems, yet almost nothing reaches long term storage. Here is why that matters.

Five famous numbers claim to measure how fast you recognize an object. None of them contradict each other. Here is what each one actually counts.

The word is right there and you still cannot say it. Sixty years of research on what partial retrieval reveals about how memory reaches for language.