While popular culture may lead you to believe that love and sex addictions are not only accepted conditions but also quite prevalent — think Frank in season 3 of White Lotus; Elizabeth Gilbert’s latest memoir All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation; and pretty much any cultural analysis of the actions of Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw around Mr. Big — the scientific understanding of problematic behaviors related to love and sex is far more nuanced.

The American Gaming Association estimates Americans will legally wager $3.3 billion on the NCAA Division I basketball tournaments this year -- a 54% increase over the past three years, according to a news release Friday from the association.

Could nicotine — the highly addictive chemical compound in tobacco plants — find a new identity as a health shortcut? Wellness influencers and biohackers are touting the benefits of nicotine in a multitude of forms, including patches, pouches, gum, and drinks.

The first time a child refuses to go to school, it can feel confusing — maybe even a little annoying. But when this pattern goes on for days, weeks or months, it can disrupt entire family systems and impact the mental health of the whole family unit. Advice such as “just be firmer,” or “maybe they just need more time,” is often well-intentioned, but it rarely addresses the heart of the issue.

When neuroscientists began studying consciousness in the early 1990s, they sought to explain how and why three pounds of spongy grey matter could generate a subjective point of view—assuming that the brain is the source of our felt reality. Pollan takes us to the cutting edge of the field, where scientists are entertaining more radical (and less materialist) theories of consciousness. He introduces us to “plant neurobiologists” searching for the first flicker of consciousness in plants; scientists striving to engineer feelings into AI, and psychologists and novelists seeking to capture the felt experience of our slippery stream of consciousness.

Discover how this feedback can manifest as traits in adulthood.

"Consciousness is under siege," says author Michael Pollan. His new book, A World Appears, explores consciousness on both a personal and technological level.

A new survey shows why girls play sports, and here's a hint—it's not all about winning.

Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences

The clock ticks past 2am. Your body is screaming for rest, but your brain just won’t quit. Instead, it replays every embarrassing thing you’ve said in the past ten years or plans for unlikely worst case scenarios. Plus, the lack of sleep will only make the anxiety worse tomorrow. You definitely need something to break the cycle, but the search for the best sleep aid for adults with anxiety has only added more anxiety and overwhelm to your plate so far.

What if pretending that you’re younger could really make you appear younger?

For more than a century, psychologists thought that the infant experience was, as the psychologist and philosopher William James famously put it, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” But new research suggests babies are born with a surprisingly sophisticated neurological toolkit that can organize the visual world into categories and pick out the beat in a song.