Tania Lombrozo

If you follow the headlines in nutrition science, you may have come across the claim that a daily bar of dark chocolate could help you lose weight faster. Websites touted the sweet news earlier this year:

"Excellent news: Chocolate can help you lose weight!" (3/31, Huffington Post)

"Need a ...

To function effectively in the world, you need to acquire a whole lot of information. You need to know exactly which medicine is appropriate for each ailment. You need to know how to fix your car and your router and your irrigation system. You need to know the date of ...

In 1998, my colleague Alison Gopnik wrote a provocative paper comparing the drive for explanations to sexual desire. Just as we're motivated to engage in an evolutionarily beneficial activity — reproduction! — by the promise of orgasm, so, too, we're motivated to discover the basic structure of the ...

In anticipation of Mother's Day, I offer you a found poem: the output of Google's autocomplete search function. Start a search for "motherhood is" and you'll learn:

May your Mother's Day this year combine a recognition of the hard with a celebration of the magical.

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Tania Lombrozo ...

Why do so many people oppose genetically modified organisms, or GMOs?

According to a new paper forthcoming in the journal Trends in Plant Science, it's because opposition to GMOs taps into deep cognitive biases. These biases conspire to make arguments against GMOs intuitive and compelling, whether or not they're ...

We associate technology with the shiny and new. But humans have been using technology to change the environment and themselves since at least the lower Paleolithic period, when our ancestors were making stone tools.

Is the technology of today fundamentally different? In particular, does it change the way we think ...

Last week, I participated in a workshop on the science-religion dialogue during which I was asked: Are scientific and religious explanations philosophically incompatible?

I've been thinking about the question ever since. The simple answers — "yes" or "no" — have advocates, but they don't seem to do the issues justice.

...

Last week, I wrote a post calling for Ruth Bader Ginger ice cream. The post was inspired by Amanda McCall's "10 delicious solutions to Ben & Jerry's women problem," which included suggestions for ice cream flavors honoring a variety of women, from S'moria Steinem to Chocolate Chip Cookie ...

The controversial measure is part of an overall healthcare bill expected to pass into law. Spain, Israel and Italy have rules against ultrathin models, but none go as far as the French measure would.

Last week, Amanda McCall proposed "10 delicious solutions to Ben & Jerry's women problem": a suite of new flavors calling attention to Ben & Jerry's gross underrepresentation of women in their flavor names.

By McCall's count, only two of Ben & Jerry's more than 20 person-named flavors over the ...

According to a news feature from the journal Nature, shortsightedness could be on the rise because children are spending less time outdoors than they used to.

In short: myopia has undergone a marked increase in the past 50 years, and several studies link this rise to the amount of ...

If you want to understand the human mind, you have to reject the idea that we directly perceive and remember the world as it is. Our perceptual experience isn't simply a passive impression of the input received by our senses — and our memory isn't like a photobook or a ...

We all know a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Research increasingly supports a related proposition — that easy knowledge can be a dangerous thing. More specifically, having knowledge at our fingertips, as smartphones and intelligent search algorithms increasingly allow, might have negative consequences for human cognition.

This idea ...

Here's your task: Based on information about individual applicants to an MBA program, you need to predict each applicant's success in the program and in subsequent employment. Specifically, you'll be given basic information — such as the applicant's undergraduate major, GMAT scores, years of work experience and an interview score ...

Valentine's Day isn't just about flowers and chocolates and heart-shaped candies. It's fundamentally about love. And we all know what love is, right?

Well, not so fast. Is love an emotion? An experience? Is it a kind of desire? Is it possible to love a fictional person? To love more ...

With the recent outbreak of measles originating from Disneyland, there's been no shortage of speculation, accusation and recrimination concerning why some people won't vaccinate their children. There's also been some — but only some — more historically and psychologically informed discussion.

Some people's motivation for skipping vaccines ...

When I was a kid, I liked this poem by Jean Little from her collection, Hey World, Here I Am!:

Our History teacher says, "Be proud you're Canadians."

My father says, "You can be proud you're Jewish."

My mother says, "Stand up straight, Kate

Be proud you're tall."

...

Thinking machines are consistently in the news these days, and often a topic of discussion here at 13.7. Last week, Alva Noë came out as a singularity skeptic, and three of us contributed to Edge.org's annual question for 2015: What do you think about machines that think?

In ...

Which is a better magic trick: turning a dove into a glass of milk, or a glass of milk into a dove? Turning a rose into a vase, or a vase into a rose?

For most people, the way these transformations go makes a big difference. In each case, they ...

Sometime in 2014, I read Brigid Schulte's Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time and was struck by this passage comparing the culture of work in America with that in Denmark:

"Most Danes don't feel obligated to check their smartphones and e-mail after hours. ...