There is a particular kind of person who cannot work at home without music playing, cannot write...
Oscar Forrester
Very Big Brain is written by Oscar Forrester, a researcher and writer with a long-standing fascination with how the brain works. Oscar spent several years working in hospital IT, including on infection control systems, and grew up in a household shaped by medicine — his father was a physician and his mother a registered nurse. He is not a clinician himself, and nothing on this site should be taken as medical advice. What he brings instead is a rigorous, source-first approach to research, honed over two decades of writing (he’s authored numerous published books, primarily on software development), and a genuine curiosity about the science of cognition. Mr. Forrester strives to present complex topics in a clear and engaging manner, making it easy for you to understand and apply the knowledge to your daily life.
The world most people inhabit is acoustically relentless. Urban noise levels during waking hours rarely drop below...
Retirement is almost universally framed as a reward — the finish line after decades of labor, the...
There is a moment that almost everyone has experienced and almost no one can fully explain: you...
In 1978, psychologists Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published a study that produced one of...
The previous article in this series established why smell has a more direct neurological pathway to the...
Of the five classical senses, taste is the one most people think they understand. Food tastes good...
Money problems feel like a mental burden. What research now shows is that they are also a...
In 2008, a pair of psychologists named Lawrence Williams and John Bargh published a study in Science...
The conventional account of impulse buying goes something like this: a person lacks self-discipline, sees something appealing,...