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Flow is more than just concentrating or paying attention; it's a unique mental state of effortless engagement. And those who more frequently experience flow report higher levels of positive emotions, creativity, and feelings of...

Why do we faint? Because sometimes, your nervous system just doesn’t know what to do with itself.

Are we really attracted to other people through pheromones? How do they work? Turns out it's much more complicated than you might think. Join Hank Green for a fascinating look into the world of human pheromones in this new episode of...

Have you ever found yourself seeing images right before falling asleep? You might be experiencing hypnagogia.

Our memories and bodies give us clues about who we are, but what happens when this guidance shifts? In this mind-bending talk, science writer Anil Ananthaswamy shares how the experiences of "altered selves" -- resulting from...

You may think you know all about hypnosis from the movies. Zoolander, The Manchurian Candidate, etc... but there's a whole lot more going on. In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank tells us about some of the many altered states...

What exactly is Consciousness? Well... that's kind of a gray area. In this episode of Crash Course Psychology, Hank gives you the basic ideas of what Consciousness is, how our attention works, and why we shouldn't text and...

A new drug reduces the risk of heart attacks by 40%. Shark attacks are up by a factor of two. Drinking a liter of soda per day doubles your chance of developing cancer. These are all examples of a common way risk is presented in news...

TED curator Chris Anderson shares his obsession with questions that no one (yet) knows the answers to. A short intro leads into two questions: Why can't we see evidence of alien life? And how many universes are there?

Scientists in the nineteenth century discovered a lot about life and matter. But exactly what kind of stuff is the human brain? That one was—and is—tricky.



The brain sciences—with experiments and therapies tied to biological...

Optical illusions are images that seem to trick our minds into seeing something different from what they actually are. But how do they work? Nathan S. Jacobs walks us through a few common optical illusions and explains what these tricks...

Have you ever wondered what color is? In this first installment of a series on light, Colm Kelleher describes the physics behind colors-- why the colors we see are related to the period of motion and the frequency of waves.

In the first of a new TED-Ed series designed to catalyze curiosity, TED Curator Chris Anderson shares his boyhood obsession with quirky questions that seem to have no answers.

Can the way you speak and write today predict your future mental state, even the onset of psychosis? In this fascinating talk, neuroscientist Mariano Sigman reflects on ancient Greece and the origins of introspection to investigate how...

TED curator Chris Anderson shares his obsession with questions that no one (yet) knows the answers to. A short intro leads into two questions: Why can't we see evidence of alien life? And how many universes are there?

The traditional model of our mental function is that first our senses provide data to our brain, which then translates those senses into the appropriate mental phenomena: light into visual images, air vibrations into auditory...

Figuring out exactly what consciousness is and whether or not it could emerge in non-human things has stumped us for centuries. Now, analyzing it from a scientific perspective might not just be possible, but necessary.

Russell Foster is a circadian neuroscientist: He studies the sleep cycles of the brain. And he asks: What do we know about sleep? Not a lot, it turns out, for something we do with one-third of our lives. In this talk, Foster shares three...

Nostalgia was once considered an illness confined to specific groups of people. Today, people all over the world report experiencing and enjoying nostalgia. But how does nostalgia work? And is it healthy? Clay Routledge details the way...

Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert starts from a surprising premise: the brain evolved, not to think or feel, but to control movement. In this entertaining, data-rich talk he gives us a glimpse into how the brain creates the grace and agility...

"Life comes at us very quickly, and what we need to do is take that amorphous flow of experience and somehow extract meaning from it." In this funny, enlightening talk, educational psychologist Peter Doolittle details the importance --...

We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day. And although we've spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect these lies by tracking physiological changes in their tellers, these methods have proved unreliable. Is there a more...

Throughout history, scientists have proposed conflicting ideas on how the brain carries out functions like perception, memory, and movement. Is each of these tasks carried out by a specific area of the brain? Or do multiple areas work...