Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”

I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.

The nature of physical stuff, by contrast, is deeply mysterious, and physics grows stranger by the hour. (Richard Feynman’s remark about quantum theory — “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics” — seems as true as ever.) Or rather, more carefully: The nature of physical stuff is mysterious except insofar as consciousness is itself a form of physical stuff.

Facebook is the world’s most influential source of news.That’s true according to every available measure of size — the billion-plus people who devour its News Feed every day, the cargo ships of profit it keeps raking in, and the tsunami of online traffic it sends to other news sites.

But Facebook has also acquired a more subtle power to shape the wider news business. Across the industry, reporters, editors and media executives now look to Facebook the same way nesting baby chicks look to their engorged mother — as the source of all knowledge and nourishment, the model for how to behave in this scary new-media world. Case in point: The New York Times, among others, recently began an initiative to broadcast live video. Why do you suppose that might be? Yup, the F word. The deal includes payments from Facebook to news outlets, including The Times.

Yet few Americans think of Facebook as a powerful media organization, one that can alter events in the real world. When blowhards rant about the mainstream media, they do not usually mean Facebook, the mainstreamiest of all social networks. That’s because Facebook operates under a veneer of empiricism. Many people believe that what you see on Facebook represents some kind of data-mined objective truth unmolested by the subjective attitudes of fair-and-balanced human beings.

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.

Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice.

While a few philosophy departments have made their curriculums more diverse, and while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.

like Google Maps for your cerebral cortex: A new interactive atlas, developed with the help of such unlikely tools as public radio podcasts and Wikipedia, purports to show which bits of your brain help you understand which types of concepts.

Hear a word relating to family, loss, or the passing of time — such as “wife,” “month,” or “remarried”— and a ridge called the right angular gyrus may be working overtime. Listening to your contractor talking about the design of your new front porch? Thank a pea-sized spot of brain behind your left ear.

The research on the “brain dictionary” has the hallmarks of a big scientific splash: Published on Wednesday in Nature, it’s accompanied by both a video and an interactive website where you can click your way from brain region to brain region, seeing what kinds of words are processed in each. Yet neuroscientists aren’t uniformly impressed.

The slogan evokes a time when America was stronger and more prosperous. But Mr. Trump doesn’t specify whether he’s expressing nostalgia for the 1950s — or 10 years ago. That vagueness is reflected by his voters, according to the results of a new survey, conducted online by the digital media and polling company Morning Consult.

Trump supporters offered a wide range of answers, with no distinct pattern. The most popular choice was the year 2000. But 1955, 1960, 1970 and 1985 were also popular. More than 2 percent of Trump’s supporters picked 2015, when Mr. Trump’s campaign began.

Political science research suggests that Americans’ optimism can be influenced by whether their political party is in the White House. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Democrats feel better than Republicans about current circumstances.

Speakers and writers of American English have recently taken to identifying a staggering and constantly changing array of trends, events, memes, products, lifestyle choices and phenomena of nearly every kind with a single label — a thing.

It would be easy to call this a curiosity of the language and leave it at that. Linguistic trends come and go.

One could, on the other hand, consider the use of “a thing” a symptom of an entire generation’s linguistic sloth, general inarticulateness and penchant for cutesy, empty, half-ironic formulations that create a self-satisfied barrier preventing any form of genuine engagement with the world around them.

The mix of things presumed to transmit and increase female power is without limit yet still depressingly limiting.“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women.

Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.

Eight years later, the educator Barbara Bryant Solomon, writing about American black communities, gave this notion a new name, “empowerment.” It was meant as an ethos for social workers in marginalized communities, to discourage paternalism and encourage their clients to solve problems in their own ways. Then in 1981, Julian Rappaport, a psychologist, broadened the concept into a political theory of power that viewed personal competency as fundamentally limitless; it placed faith in the individual and laid at her feet a corresponding amount of responsibility too.

what psychology teaches us. Turns out most of us just aren’t that good at calculating risk, especially when it comes to huge natural events like earthquakes. That also means we’re not very good at mitigating those kinds of risks. Why? And is it possible to get around our short-sightedness, so that this time, we’re actually prepared? Risk perception is a vast, complex field of research. Here are just some of the core findings.

Studies show that when people calculate risk, especially when the stakes are high, we rely much more on feeling than fact. And we have trouble connecting emotionally to something scary if the odds of it happening today or tomorrow aren’t particularly high. So, if an earthquake, flood, tornado or hurricane isn’t immediately imminent, people are unlikely to act. “Perceiving risk is all about how scary or not do the facts feel,”

This feeling also relates to how we perceive natural, as opposed to human-made, threats. We tend to be more tolerant of nature than of other people who would knowingly impose risks upon us—terrorists being the clearest example. “We think that nature is out of our control—it’s not malicious, it’s not profiting from us, we just have to bear with it,”

In everyday conversation, we tend to use the word “theory” to mean a hunch, an idle speculation, or a crackpot notion.

That’s not what “theory” means to scientists.“In science, the word theory isn’t applied lightly,” Kenneth R. Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University, said. “It doesn’t mean a hunch or a guess. A theory is a system of explanations that ties together a whole bunch of facts. It not only explains those facts, but predicts what you ought to find from other observations and experiments.”

In 2002, the board of education in Cobb County, Ga., adopted the textbook but also required science teachers to put a warning sticker inside the cover of every copy.“Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things,” the sticker read, in part.In 2004, several Cobb County parents filed a lawsuit against the county board of education to have the stickers removed. They called Dr. Miller, who testified for about two hours, explaining, among other things, the strength of evidence for the theory of evolution.

DO you remember the controversy two years ago, when the Yale law professors Amy Chua (author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”) and Jed Rubenfeld published “The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America”?We sure do. As psychologists, we found the book intriguing, because its topic — why some people succeed and others don’t — has long been a basic research question in social science, and its authors were advancing a novel argument. They contended that certain ethnic and religious minority groups (among them, Cubans, Jews and Indians) had achieved disproportionate success in America because their individual members possessed a combination of three specific traits: a belief that their group was inherently superior to others; a sense of personal insecurity; and a high degree of impulse control.

it offered no rigorous quantitative evidence to support its theory. This, of course, didn’t stop people from attacking or defending the book. But it meant that the debate consisted largely of arguments based on circumstantial evidence.

we took the time to empirically test the triple package hypothesis directly. Our results have just been published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. We found scant evidence for Professors Chua and Rubenfeld’s theory.

Much of the student population would likely agree that the library’s menacing figure on the quad is nothing short of soul-crushing. New research conducted by a team of architects and neuroscientists suggests that architecture may indeed affect mental states, though they choose to focus on the positive.

I spoke with Dr. Julio Bermudez, the lead of a new study that uses fMRI to capture the effects of architecture on the brain. His team operates with the goal of using the scientific method to transform something opaque—the qualitative “phenomenologies of our built environment”—into neuroscientific observations that architects and city planners can deliberately design for. Bermudez and his team’s research question focuses on buildings and sites designed to elicit contemplation: They theorize that the presence of “contemplative architecture” in one’s environment may over time produce the same health benefits as traditional “internally induced” meditation, except with much less effort by the individual.

By showing 12 architects photos of contemplative and non-contemplative buildings from facade to interior, the researchers were able to observe the brain activity that occurred as subjects "imagined they were transported to the places being shown." All of the architects were white, right-handed men with no prior meditative training, creating the necessary (if comical) uniformity for neuroscientific research—the team wanted to ensure that the brain scans would not be influenced by factors unrelated to the photos, like gender, race, or handedness. For instance, the brain scans of left- and right-handed people often look different even when subjects are performing the same task.

Worse, this rumored dustiness reinforces the widespread notion that natural history museums are about the past — just a place to display bugs and brontosaurs. Visitors may go there to be entertained, or even awe-struck, but they are often completely unaware that curators behind the scenes are conducting research into climate change, species extinction and other pressing concerns of our day. That lack of awareness is one reason these museums are now routinely being pushed to the brink. Even the National Science Foundation, long a stalwart of federal support for these museums, announced this month that it was suspending funding for natural history collections as it conducts a yearlong budget review.

It gets worse: A new Republican governor last year shut down the renowned Illinois State Museum, ostensibly to save the state $4.8 million a year. The museum pointed out that this would actually cost $33 million a year in lost tourism revenue and an untold amount in grants. But the closing went through, endangering a trove of 10 million artifacts, from mastodon bones to Native American tools, collected over 138 years, and now just languishing in the shuttered building. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science, characterized it as an act of “political corruption and malevolent anti-intellectualism.”

Other museums have survived by shifting their focus from research to something like entertainment.

A’s — once reserved for recognizing excellence and distinction — are today the most commonly awarded grades in America.

That’s true at both Ivy League institutions and community colleges, at huge flagship publics and tiny liberal arts schools, and in English, ethnic studies and engineering departments alike. Across the country, wherever and whatever they study, mediocre students are increasingly likely to receive supposedly superlative grades.

Analyzing 70 years of transcript records from more than 400 schools, the researchers found that the share of A grades has tripled, from just 15 percent of grades in 1940 to 45 percent in 2013. At private schools, A’s account for nearly a majority of grades awarded.

We’ve all done it. Run upstairs to get your keys, but forget that it is them you’re looking for once you get to the bedroom. Open the fridge door and reach for the middle shelf only to realise that we can't remember why we opened the fridge in the first place. Or wait for a moment to interrupt a friend to find that the burning issue that made us want to interrupt has now vanished from our minds

It’s known as the “Doorway Effect”, and it reveals some important features of how our minds are organised. Understanding this might help us appreciate those temporary moments of forgetfulness as more than just an annoyance

“What are you doing today?” she asks the first. “I’m putting brick after sodding brick on top of another,” sighs the first. “What are you doing today?” she asks the second. “I’m building a wall,” is the simple reply. But the third builder swells with pride when asked, and replies: “I’m building a cathedral!”

We’ve all heard the argument that philosophy is isolated, an “ivory tower” discipline cut off from virtually every other progress-making pursuit of knowledge, including math and the sciences, as well as from the actual concerns of daily life. The reasons given for this are many. In a widely read essay in this series, “When Philosophy Lost Its Way,” Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle claim that it was philosophy’s institutionalization in the university in the late 19th century that separated it from the study of humanity and nature, now the province of social and natural sciences.

This institutionalization, the authors claim, led it to betray its central aim of articulating the knowledge needed to live virtuous and rewarding lives. I have a different view: Philosophy isn’t separated from the social, natural or mathematical sciences, nor is it neglecting the study of goodness, justice and virtue, which was never its central aim.

identified philosophy with informal linguistic analysis. Fortunately, this narrow view didn’t stop them from contributing to the science of language and the study of law. Now long gone, neither movement defined the philosophy of its day and neither arose from locating it in universities.

By the early ’90s, so long as one had the good sense to major in the humanities — all bets were off in the STEM fields — it was nearly impossible to get a final grade below a B-minus at an elite college. According to a 2012 study, the average college GPA, which in the 1930s was a C-plus, had risen to a B at public universities and a B-plus at private schools. At Duke, Pomona and Harvard, D’s and F’s combine for just 2 percent of all grades. A Yale report found that 62 percent of all Yale grades are A or A-minus. According to a 2013 article in the Harvard Crimson, the median grade at Harvard was an A-minus , while the most common grade was an A.

The result is widespread panic about grade inflation at elite schools. (The phenomenon is not as prevalent at community colleges and less-selective universities.) Some blame students’ consumer mentality, a few see a correlation with small class sizes (departments with falling enrollments want to keep students happy), and many cite a general loss of rigor in a touchy-feely age.

Yet whenever elite schools have tried to fight grade inflation, it’s been a mess. Princeton instituted strict caps on the number of high grades awarded, then abandoned the plan, saying the caps dissuaded applicants and made students miserable. At Wellesley, grade-inflated humanities departments mandated that the average result in their introductory and intermediate classes not exceed a B-plus. According to one study, enrollment fell by one-fifth, and students were 30 percent less likely to major in one of these subjects.

A landmark 2015 report that cast doubt on the results of dozens of published psychology studies has exposed deep divisions in the field, serving as a reality check for many working researchers but as an affront to others who continue to insist the original research was sound.

On Thursday, a group of four researchers publicly challenged the report, arguing that it was statistically flawed and, as a result, wrong.The 2015 report, called the Reproducibility Project, found that less than 40 studies in a sample of 100 psychology papers in leading journals held up when retested by an independent team. The new critique by the four researchers countered that when that team’s statistical methodology was adjusted, the rate was closer to 100 percent.Neither the original analysis nor the critique found evidence of fraud or manipulation of data.

“That study got so much press, and the wrong conclusions were drawn from it,” said Timothy D. Wilson, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and an author of the new critique. “It’s a mistake to make generalizations from something that was done poorly, and this we think was done poorly.”

Learning in midlife to juggle, swim, ride a bicycle or, in my case, snowboard could change and strengthen the brain in ways that practicing other familiar pursuits such as crossword puzzles or marathon training will not, according to an accumulating body of research about the unique impacts of motor learning on the brain.

Such complex thinking generally is classified as “higher-order” cognition and results in activity within certain portions of the brain and promotes plasticity, or physical changes, in those areas. There is strong evidence that learning a second language as an adult, for instance, results in increased white matter in the parts of the brain known to be involved in language processing.

Regular exercise likewise changes the brain, as I frequently have written, with studies in animals showing that running and other types of physical activities increase the number of new brain cells created in parts of the brain that are integral to memory and thinking.

THE history of moral philosophy is a history of disagreement, but on one point there has been virtual unanimity: It would be absurd to suggest that we should do what we couldn’t possibly do.

This principle — that “ought” implies “can,” that our moral obligations can’t exceed our abilities — played a central role in the work of Immanuel Kant and has been widely accepted since.

His thought experiments go something like this: Suppose that you and a friend are both up for the same job in another city. She interviewed last weekend, and your flight for the interview is this evening. Your car is in the shop, though, so your friend promises to drive you to the airport. But on the way, her car breaks down — the gas tank is leaking — so you miss your flight and don’t get the job.Would it make any sense to tell your friend, stranded at the side of the road, that she ought to drive you to the airport? The answer seems to be an obvious no (after all, she can’t drive you), and most philosophers treat this as all the confirmation they need for the principle.Suppose, however, that the situation is slightly different. What if your friend intentionally punctures her own gas tank to make sure that you miss the flight and she gets the job? In this case, it makes perfect sense to insist that your friend still has an obligation to drive you to the airport. In other words, we might indeed say that someone ought to do what she can’t — if we’re blaming her.

Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.

If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.

Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.