Cognitive economy dictates that we categorize things in such a way as not to be overwhelmed by details that, for most purposes, don’t matter.

From a strictly evolutionary standpoint, your job is to propagate as many of your genes as possible.

number of decisions per day and once we reach that limit, we can’t make any more, regardless of how important they are. One of the most useful findings in recent neuroscience could be summed up as: The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.

Envisioning or planning one’s future, projecting oneself into a situation (especially a social situation), feeling empathy, invoking autobiographical memories also involve this daydreaming or mind-wandering network. If you’ve ever stopped what you were doing to picture the consequence of some future action or to imagine yourself in a particular fut

drop them.

Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.

Until 1600, the typical

he felt more relaxed and better able to focus on his work. This observation is based in neurology. When we have something on our minds that is important—especially a To Do item—we’re afraid we’ll forget it, so our brain rehearses it, tossing it around and around in circles in

neuroscientists are increasingly appreciating that consciousness is not an all-or-nothing state; rather, it is a continuum of different states. We say colloquially that this or that is happening in the subconscious mind as though it were a geographically separate part of the brain, somewhere down deep in a dank, dimly lit basement of the cranium. T