Here’s one thing you can look forward to early next year. Dan Ariely, a well-known professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, will present A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior as a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

Just over a year ago, we featured a clip of an interview with Laura Archera Huxley, widow of British dystopian novelist and noted psychedelic drug enthusiast Aldous Huxley. When he approached death’s door in 1963, he asked her to give him a dose of “LSD, 100 µg, intramuscular.

I’ve always thought of writer, actor and filmmaker Miranda July as someone who creates her own opportunities.

“In this program,” says narrator Peter Capaldi at the outset, “we’re going to show you how to be more rational, and deal with some of life’s biggest decisions.

If it is the bulk of the world’s cheating, stealing, and deception you seek, says Duke professor of psychology and behavioral economics Dan Ariely, look not to the heinous acts of individual villains; look to the countless dishonest acts committed daily by the rest of humanity.

Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker garnered a significant amount of attention in the past year for his massive, 800-page book Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues the controversial thesis that, despite the atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries, violence has declined worldwide and we live in the most peaceful era in human histo

You almost certainly learned about Philip Zimbardo in school. In 1971, as a Stanford University psychology professor, he conducted the infamous “Stanford prison experiment” wherein he recruited 24 students to populate a simulated basement jail.

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature.

In this week’s issue of the New Yorker, neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks has an article titled “Altered States.” Subtitled “Self-experiments in chemistry,” it covers, to be blunter, what Sacks experienced and learned — or failed to learn, substance depending — when he began doing drugs.

Intelligence comes at a price. The human species, despite its talent for solving problems, has managed over the millennia to turn one of its most basic survival mechanisms–the stress response–against itself.