(The following is a companion piece to the Slate article, “Eugene Hoskins Is His Name: The long-forgotten story of a black autistic man in Oxford, Miss., who crossed paths with William Faulkner.” You can read that story by clicking here.) When Professor Hiram Byrd opened up the autistic savant Eugene Hoskins’ private notebook back in [...]

The following is an edited excerpt from The Belief Instinct, which will be released as a paperback on Feb. 20. When I moved to my previous house in a small village in Northern Ireland in late 2007, there was still quite a bit of work to be done, including laying flooring in an intolerably small, [...]

The brain has a problem. Information can only enter it through sensory apparatuses: the eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin. And the information that enters the brain is fairly simple. The brain therefore has an enormous task: to take sparse inputs and transform them into extremely complex cognitive representations. For example, the retina that coats [...]

When my brother and I were young, we were very careful to share the last bit of dessert equally. It’s not that we were particularly magnanimous. In their wisdom, my parents instituted a rule in our house: one of us would divide the snack in half, and the other would select his half. “You cut, [...]

If a human points his or her finger at something, a dog might infer that there’s hidden food, while the chimpanzee remains more or less clueless about the meaning behind that sort of non-verbal communication. As dogs have evolved in a social space occupied by human social partners, they’ve gained the unique ability not only [...]

Sometimes, zoo animals behave unnaturally. Most animals on display at zoos are not really designed for captive living. If you’ve been to a zoo, no doubt you’ve noticed evidence of this: a tiger who paces back and forth, or a monkey that does nothing but circle the enclosure. Life in captivity can even result in [...]

Yogi Bear always claimed that he was smarter than the average bear, but the average bear appears to be smarter than once thought. Psychologists Jennifer Vonk of Oakland University and Michael J. Beran of Georgia State University have taken a testing methodology commonly used for primates and shown not only that the methodology can be [...]

“I walked into the house, and he was acting strange. I could tell he had done something wrong,” she told me. I pressed for further details. “His head was down, and he wasn’t making eye contact,” she explained. “Then, I found it. Under the bed.” She had spent weeks training her dog, Henry, not to [...]

When is a yawn just a yawn? When is a yawn more than a yawn? Contagious yawning – the increase in likelihood that you will yawn after watching or hearing someone else yawn – has been of particular interest to researchers in fields as varied as primatology, developmental psychology, and psychopathology. At first, scientists thought [...]

Sometime between fifteen and thirty thousand years ago, probably in the Middle East, the long, protracted process of domestication began to alter the genetic code of the wolf, eventually leaving us with the animals we know and love as domestic dogs. While there are several different theories as to exactly how dog domestication began, what [...]

A trip to an unfamiliar part of the world is all you need in order to realize that humans have vastly different ways of eating, playing, talking, problem-solving, and so much more. Some of us use forks, while others prefer chopsticks, and still others simply eat with their hands. All three of these solutions emerged [...]

sciseekclaimtoken-4f761877d9aec I was recently reminded of the fantastic 2001 PBS/NOVA series Evolution, which was released in tandem with Carl Zimmer’s book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. The whole series is great, but episode 6, The Mind’s Big Bang, was my favorite. And this segment in particular, starting around the 2:15 mark, featuring Andrew Whiten. [...]