We’ve all read books and watched films that have transported us and changed us, that have catapulted our imaginations into lives vastly different from our own. Think of a movie like City of God, which reveals the violent world of two boys growing…

Robots may not have the capacity to care about us  yet, but that won’t stop humans from feeling unrequited love for their android buddies. While it may seem obvious to those of us who have harbored a mad Data crush at one point or another,&n…

The possibility of empathy is a western-buddhist dogma. Empathy, together with its near relative, compassion, may even be considered a necessary axiom of contemporary x-buddhist belief, whether in a secular, crypto, or traditional inflection. For, with…

Daniel Reisel studies the brains of criminal psychopaths (and mice). And he asks a big question: Instead of warehousing these criminals, shouldn’t we be using what we know about the brain to help them rehabilitate? Put another way: If the brain c…