"It is fair to say that I – along with 10% to 40% of the general population – am noise-sensitive, meaning that I feel more upset and disturbed by noise than the average person.

It would be easy to dismiss noise sensitivity as a personality flaw, a symptom of generally being belligerent, whiny, and...

"The brain is not purely a cognition machine, but an object sculpted by evolution — and therefore constrained by the tight energy budget of a biological system.

Thinking may make you feel tired, then, not because you are out of energy, but because you have evolved to preserve resources.

This stu...