How are you feeling right now? You might be happy, angry, sad, or whatever, and you probably can think of the reason. But have you ever wondered what these emotion reactions themselves are for? As a civilized primate, why do we even possess emotions? Over millions of years, emotions evolved, guiding our ancestors toward behavior that was good for surviving and thriving. As an evolved primate, you...

When someone holds a one-sided point of view, we accuse him or her of being prejudiced, or having a bias. Human beings on an individual basis are inclined to interpret situations in biased ways, often based on their cultural norms and beliefs. But there is another kind of bias, called cognitive bias, that all humans share. Cognitive bias is our tendency to make systematic decisions in certain circumstances...

You are reading this page on a computer screen. Light from the screen hits your retinas, which convert it to signals that the brain processes and transforms into language. Your capacity to perceive these signals and translate them into something meaningful in the brain is called awareness. In the most general sense, an organism’s ability to integrate external sensations with drives and emotions...

Culture is the knowledge, beliefs, behavior, outlook, attitudes, values, goals, traditions, and practices shared by a group of people that cannot be attributed to genetics. We define culture as the universal human ability to encode and transmit our experiences symbolically. Anthropologist Rob Boyd calls culture the “engine of human adaptation,” explaining that it was by accumulating and...