Robin Dunbar
Community and Connection in Recovery
In the late 1970s, psychologist Bruce Alexander conducted an experiment that would quietly revolutionize our understanding of addiction. He built Rat Park — a spacious, stimulating environment with tunnels, platforms, wheels, cedar shavings, and other rats to socialize with.
Cognitive Aging and Brain Health
The human brain ages. This simple fact underlies one of the greatest fears of growing older — the specter of cognitive decline, the gradual erosion of the capacities for memory, reasoning, language, and self-regulation that define personhood.
Terence McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory: How Psilocybin Mushrooms May Have Catalyzed Human Consciousness
Terence Kemp McKenna (1946-2000) was many things: ethnobotanist, psychonaut, author, lecturer, and the most eloquent spokesperson for the psychedelic experience that the English language has ever produced. But his most enduring contribution was a single hypothesis — an idea so radical that...
Collective Effervescence and Group Consciousness: When Individual Minds Merge Into a Collective Field
You have felt it. At a concert, when the crowd surges together and the music reaches its peak and for a moment the boundary between you and the ten thousand people around you dissolves into a single pulsing organism.
The Social Brain Hypothesis: Why Human Brains Evolved for Social Computing
The human brain weighs approximately 1.4 kilograms — roughly 2% of body mass. It consumes approximately 20% of the body's metabolic energy — ten times what would be predicted from its weight alone.
The Neurochemistry of Peak Experience: Mapping Maslow's Highest Moments to Molecular Biology
Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist who gave us the hierarchy of needs, spent the last two decades of his career (1950s-1970s) studying something that psychology had systematically ignored: the best moments of human life. Not pathology.
Gothic Cathedrals and Gregorian Chant: How Sacred Architecture Engineered Altered States Through Sound
Walk into Chartres Cathedral on a quiet afternoon and clap your hands once. Then wait.