The theory that the brain produces its own psychedelic compound provokes pop-culture enthusiasm and scientific controversy. By Graham St John.

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living” – Marcus Tullius Cicero. By Aaron Dabbah.

"What I want to do here, by way of therapy, is give a taste of how told folklore and lived folklore bleed into each other." By Simon Young.

Emmanuel Mignot applauds Henry Nicholls’s personal and scientific account of narcolepsy and beyond.

A flashing, howling robot that protects crops from wild animals is going into mass production. By Tae-jun Kang, Alistair Coleman.

Aeon Videos

When you're trying to figure out what alien life might look like, it makes sense to be looking in the most extreme environments Earth has available. By Michelle Starr.

In ancient times, the gates seemed to respond to supernatural powers, but it's actually all about science. By Julissa Treviño.

One of the best documented cases ever of a ‘rain’ of fish took place in Cross Creek Ranch, a planned community development in Fulshear, Texas on the afternoon of January 16, 2018. By Paul Cropper.

Bizarre stuff. By Kate Erbland.

At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today.

Attendees at a Dutch music festival volunteer to be tested while wearing something called a 'God helmet' and some of the results were surprising. By Paul Seaburn.

They took all the trees and put them in a tree museum—and one of the trees has Stuckie the dog.

Forty years after revelations that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency funded brainwashing experiments on unsuspecting Canadians, the Trudeau government is continuing a pattern of silencing the victims, a lawyer for one of the families says. By Harvey Cashore, Lisa Ellenwood, Bob McKeown.

There are rules of the physical world that don’t apply to the mental world... By Tara MacIsaac.

The 2011 earthquake and tsunami killed thousands in Japan. Those left behind were haunted by the dead, and some were possessed by them. By Richard Lloyd Parry.

The Dark History of "Bedsheet Ghosts." By Lucas Reilly.

Vanessa Potter unexpectedly lost her sight. As she recovered, her senses mingled and hearing and touch changed the way she saw the world.

"Speaking with his novelist friend Paul Bourget, prior to writing Le Horla, Maupassant confessed that he frequently encountered his own double, and while he repeatedly assured himself that it was pure hallucination, he recognized that his mind was starting to slip." By Aaron Dabbah.

The Affair of the Poisons was one to remember. By Natasha Frost.