There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a little pride. It can propel you forward in tough situations and demonstrates a level of self-assuredness that we all strive for in our personal and professional lives. But there’s a narrow line dividing healthy confidence and stubborn ego, and one of the primary indicators you’ve landed on the wrong side is not being able to admit when you’re wrong.

Struggling to admit our own fault, though — whether it was a major breach or a minor mess-up — doesn’t really serve us well. Not only can it sour some of our closest relationships, but it can even be detrimental to our own personal growth.

In other cases, though, it’s possible to be aware that you’re wrong — whether mildly or outright — but still struggle to wave the guilty flag due to our precious egos.

Even when you know how an optical illusion works, it can be hard to convince your senses that what you're seeing isn't real. The best way to demystify an illusion isn't necessarily to read about it—sometimes, you just need to see the image from a different perspective.

Once the solutions have been revealed, you may still have trouble reconciling what you see with what you know to be true. But at the very least, turning the illusions off in the moving images below should give your brain a break.

Communication gestures used by humans and our primate relatives are providing clues about how our species' ability to use spoken language evolved.

But human language is one such oddity. Our ability to use subtle combinations of sounds produced by our vocal cords to create words and sentences, which when combined with grammatical rules, convey complex ideas.

"The idea is to look at language, not just as speech, but seeing it as a constellation of many cognitive properties,"

Although they shared all their genes and grew up with the same adoring parents, clearly there were differences in these boys that had been influenced by other factors in their environment, both prenatal and postnatal.

The relative importance of nature and nurture to how a child develops has been debated by philosophers and psychologists for centuries, and has had strong — and sometimes misguided — influences on public policy.

“Genes define your potential, but your environment largely determines how you turn out. The few who escape negative influences are outliers.

The (relatively) new technology of the 1930s was the radio. “It is the miracle of radio that it welds 60,000,000 Germans into a single crowd, to be played upon by a single voice,”

the conviction that an opponent embodies an irredeemable evil, and that his destruction is therefore an act of indubitable good. That spirit of certitude that dominated the politics of the 1930s is not so distant from us today.

But now we as a global community have some monumental decisions to make about our children’s future within just the next 10 to 25 years -- basically, two or three Presidents worth. 

It’s so easy to ignore, or maybe even too daunting to think about, as we go about our everyday lives. But we’re now well beyond the luxury of ostrich behavior. As Illinois’ future climate morphs over the next few decades to become more similar to that of northern Texas or South Carolina today, I urge you to think about the magnitude of it and take action, because we need a mobilization the size of which humanity has never seen. 

the ways the online environment is changing how we communicate

No more. Even the meanest online conversationalist writes more in a day than most 20th-century folk did in a week, and all that practice is producing new complexity.

changing the way we use language, it’s changing the way we think about it.