Mary Martin

What happens when what we’re thinking becomes increasingly transparent to technology and therefore to the rest of the world?

When the mind searches for the future, it sees the past.

Decades later, scientists are starting to unravel how our wet, spongy, slippery organs talk to the brain and how the brain talks back. That two-way communication, known as interoception, encompasses a complex, bodywide system of nerves and hormones. Much recent exploration has focused on the vagus nerve: a massive, meandering network of more than... See more

Maybe AI doesn’t raise the bar. Maybe it reveals how low we’ve let the bar drop. In a world where ghosting is normal and attentiveness is rare, a chatbot that listens is radical.

While the same laws of physics reign over Earth’s smallest and largest species, the balance of forces shifts with size. Intermolecular forces flex beneath the feet of water striders on a pond, capillary forces shoot water impossibly upward through a plant’s thin roots, and electrostatic forces can ensnare any oppositely charged flecks that lie in... See more