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Sam McNerney

Science writer

I graduated from Hamilton College with a degree in Philosophy. Now I write about philosophy (mostly epistemology) and psychology (mostly decision making and well-being) at Scientific American and Big Think. My personal blog is SamMcNerney.com. @SamMcNerney.


The following is an upcoming post for CreativityPost.com. It riffs on themes I discussed in my previous post on humor. If you have not already, check out CreativityPost.com. There’s great […]
“How do Americans spend their leisure time?” That question was posed by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom in his 2010 book How Pleasure Works. The answer, Bloom says, is “participating in […]
Humans are a distractible bunch. We’re easily seduced by ads and offers, memes and tweets. When we’re not focused on useless gimmicks and irrelevant social chatter our minds drift into […]
Breakthrough ideas don’t happen overnight. Origins of Species was published in 1859, 28 years after Darwin first boarded HMS Beagle;James Joyce spent seventeen years writing Finnegans Wake;and when Edison filed […]
While writing this post, my mood will vary. I’ll enjoy the beginning – riffing on a new idea is always exciting – but I’ll inevitably hit difficult patches. A few […]
“Are great musician born or made?” That question was posed by Gary Marcus, who at the age of 38, wondered if he could overcome a lifetime of musical failure – […]
The ultimate goal of any education system should be to give people the opportunity to find and bring to life that which motivates them intrinsically. 
For most of human history creativity was something that came from the muses; it was about flashes of insight from another world. Today we know that creativity is something that […]
Improv isn’t about wisecracks and one-liners. It’s about creating a structure where characters and narratives are quickly created, developed, sometimes forgotten and other times resolved. 
Several years ago, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister conducted a study that measured the productivity of computer programmers. Their data set included more than 600 programmers from 92 companies. According […]