Quiz Guy John Chaneski was inspired by his college-age son’s remote classes, which he could hear but not quite make out through the wall. For this week’s puzzle, he offers a similarly garbled description of a college course. For example, which...
While studying psychology in West Lafayette, Indiana, Sarah wondered whether it’s correct to speak of a treatment’s efficacy or its effectiveness. Usually, in research and professional settings, efficacy describes how well a treatment works under...
After our conversation about monastic sign language, Cameron Brick, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, emailed to share his own stories about nonverbal communication and the power of silence. This is part of a...
Steve in Neenah, Wisconsin, says he’d not heard the term suss out in a long time, but then suddenly he was hearing again it in several different places. What he’s experiencing is the frequency illusion, also known as the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon or...
Solastalgia is psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change, or by change to a place that has been familiar. Coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, solastalgia combines the Greek root -algia, meaning pain, and solas...
New research published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that people who speak more than one languagetend to be less superstitious if they’re reading or thinking in a different language. This is part of a complete episode...