Mary Martin

greater inquisitiveness motivated people to slow down, be pa­tient and invest in experiencing the winding path to resolution.

“It seems like there’s a dog paper every day,” says Alan McElligott, a zoologist at the City University of Hong Kong who has studied the minds of goats and other farm animals. “It’s almost impossible to keep up with it.” What’s worse, others say, most money for livestock research still goes to studies aimed at improving milk or meat yields, not to... See more

when an army of trauma counsellors descended upon the nation after the tsunami of 2004, the University of Colombo pleaded with them to cease seeing suffering as traumatisation as it was undermining people’s resilience. Sri Lanka happens to top the charts for wellbeing in the ‘The Mental State of the World in 2023’ report despite such denial of the... See more

A new study reveals that regardless of task difficulty, people’s minds increasingly wander with time, reaching a 50% distraction rate towards the end of activities. Analyzing over 10,000 participants in 68 studies, the research found no significant difference in distraction levels across various tasks. This phenomenon persists even without external... See more

Interestingly, many users who emotionally mourned the ‘loss’ of GPT-4o expressed complete awareness of its lack of consciousness. And yet, in many cases, the subjective grief that they felt was no less real. This demonstrates that the power of the illusion is such that a given user might not actually believe that their AI companion is conscious,... See more

The anthropocentrism of humanity’s

predominant relationship to the environment is so extreme that this gratuitous violence against

other animals (both domesticated and free-living) goes largely unnoticed in everyday society.

Meanwhile, environmental justice, the very field established to champion public awareness

and policy in the service of... See more