Do we swallow spiders in our sleep? Almost certainly not, and the famous number — eight per year — was not discovered by anyone. It was written in 1993 by a magazine columnist trying to prove how easily a fake statistic could travel. The demonstration worked rather too well. The story is one of the … Read more
Jet lag is not imagination. Fly from New York to Tokyo and your liver, muscles, and immune cells are still running on New York time while the sun says otherwise. What is circadian rhythm, at its core, is a set of internal clocks that expect the day to be about 24 hours long — and … Read more
Why do we dream? The honest answer is that nobody knows for certain, and it is worth being upfront about that before surveying the theories — because this is a topic where confident explanations vastly outrun the evidence. What we have are several plausible, partially-supported accounts that are not mutually exclusive. What We Know For … Read more