How do schools of fish swim in harmony? How do the tiny cells in your brain give rise to the complex thoughts, memories, and consciousness that are you? Oddly enough, those questions have the same general answer. Nathan S. Jacobs explains the concept of emergence, the spontaneous creation of sophisticated behaviors and functions from large group...

Optical illusions are images that seem to trick our minds into seeing something different from what they actually are. But how do they work? Nathan S. Jacobs walks us through a few common optical illusions and explains what these tricks of the eye can tell us about how our brains assemble visual information into the 3D world we see around us. [D...