Mary Martin

The next time you’re driving home in a car or sitting down to enjoy a meal, spare some thought for the ways in which the neurochemical soup in your brain mimics your gut: helping you to digest complex patterns of information as you navigate the intricacies of your daily life.

al­­though piquing interest can indeed drive an urgent desire for answers, it can also elicit more patience, setting people up for those moments of discovery.

You can do this practice not only thinking of people you care about, but also visualizing people you don’t like. It’s important to have an unbiased, compassionate attitude toward whatever is arising.

A chatbot helped more people access mental-health services

it would appear the plague-clouds are within us, too. They illustrate the interconnectedness of our inner and outer worlds. They betray a certain flimsiness of human agency, painting our decision-making in strokes of environmental influence far bolder than our intuition suggests. And they throw the climate crisis into fresh, stark relief: because,... See more

One of the most honest accounts I’ve encountered of humanity’s relationship with nonhuman animals comes from political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel, who describes it as a state of war — not a metaphorical war, but a literal one, in which we are the aggressors. If you were an alien who knew nothing about our species, you might expect a civilization that... See more

intelligence has inadvertently become a ‘human success’-shaped cookie cutter we squish onto other species. Switching from baking to sports metaphors, we could say that everyone else – animals, amoebas, AIs and aliens – has to play the game on a field that we have laid out, according to rules that we have established and proven ourselves extremely... See more

Smell has the power to evoke strong emotions and trigger vivid memories, making it an ideal candidate for enhancing children’s experiences in a living enactment of the story on a trail within the museum.