Debbie Foster

There is nothing more human than the experience of lying in the dark, wondering: What if I don't wake up? In that way, sleep becomes existential cross-training: dread faced nightly, and nightly overcome.

Recent research discovered a startling facet of life—brief periods during which consciousness is absent while the body carries on its well-rehearsed duties: driving, doing the dishes, or reading a long and uninspiring office memo. To an observer, everything looks normal while the subject is, in fact, zoned out. During these episodes of mind blankin

Our language-based theories of how our minds work don't often succeed in explaining how our minds actually work, for so many layers of the mind's operations occur prior to the stories and explanations we offer with language. Neuroscience is helpful in capturing more subconscious processes.

…we are composed from what is not us. We are a bricolage of what is to hand in the place and time of our formation. Psychological origin stories tend to focus on the influence of one or two main characters, usually the parents, often ignoring other players and the setting entirely, but these are key variables that need to be accounted for in the st

For Grush, the specious present not only lets the brain get a jump on events, but also gives it time to sync up nerve signals arriving on different schedules from all parts of the body.

What was previously a series of directed streams was now a disembodied ocean as vast as the cosmos. And whereas this invisible sea had seemed to Maxwell to be filled with the presence of God, by the fin de siècle it had come to seem more like a wasteland

The best way to understand your dreams is to study them in a series over time.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from re

If we follow Eliphas Lévi by placing invisibility in the mind, we make it subject to the dictates of the will. The power of invisibility is then a question of who commands that will