Martin Rees, Britain’s leading cosmologist, studies stars. Neuropsychologists like me study brains. But we seem to find a shared wavelength on multiverses, aliens, climate change and science...

Paul Broks talks fiction, football and cultural value with the godfather of lad-lit

What's wrong with a man buying an oven-ready chicken, having sex with it, then serving it to his friends for dinner? Disgust is the guardian of our souls

Nicholas Humphrey's latest book on the mystery of consciousness travelled with me to Crete, Latvia and America. And the intellectual journey it took me on has half-persuaded me that his evolutionary...

Music is not mere "auditory cheesecake"—it tunes the engines of self-awareness. That's why I ration my intake of Arvo Pärt and drive to the Small Faces

Teaching my son to drive exposes him to a high risk of death. He is as responsible as I was at 17, but his brain is not yet ready to prevent him taking chances

I call it "Broks's paradox": the condition of believing that the mind is separate from the body, even though you know this belief to be untrue

Jason has had unsuccessful brain surgery for his epilepsy. My visit to him is now forever associated in my mind with the horror of the gingerbread man

I have long dreamed of tsunamis, although I grew up far from the ocean. The disaster seems to have stirred the ancient relics of our common humanity

Our minds are partly shaped by mimicry, which is why Phil makes me feel alert and Jeff leaves me empty — and why Tony Blair apes the way George W Bush walks