Ryan Collison

Your brain is a prediction machine that hates loose ends. When two unrelated events coincide dramatically, it reaches for meaning. Jung built a theory around this feeling. Modern neuroscience explains it as a feature — and a bug — of how the brain constructs reality.

His predictions always seem to come true after the fact. That's not because Nostradamus was gifted — vague language plus pattern-hungry brains equals inevitable prophecy.

You stop thinking about the problem. Then, in the shower or on a walk, the answer arrives fully formed. Neuroscience is finally mapping what happens in the brain during those moments of sudden insight.

The feeling that boundaries dissolve and everything is one has a measurable neural signature. Psilocybin, meditation, and spontaneous mystical states all suppress the default mode network similarly. The oldest human experience is getting its first mechanistic explanation.

Near-death experiences feel more real than ordinary life to those who have them. The neuroscience of a dying brain — surging gamma waves, oxygen starvation, REM intrusion — suggests why, without fully explaining the experience away.

Daryl Bem ran nine experiments that appeared to show people responding to stimuli before they appeared. The paper passed peer review at a top journal. Then the replication attempts began — and the story got complicated in the best possible way.