ARCHIVE.

Print the word BLUE in red ink, ask someone to name the ink, and watch the answer stall. The word and the colour are both shouting, and the word is louder.

Things can get better and people can still feel worse off. It depends on who they're comparing themselves with.

Two spoons sit in the same drawer for a week and end up at exactly the same temperature, yet the metal one feels colder in your hand. Your skin isn't measuring the spoon. It's reporting the temperature of the handshake between you.

Your brain can sort colours, sounds and memories, and in principle you could explain all that sorting without anyone needing to be home. Yet tasting your morning coffee feels like something from the inside. Science has several serious rival accounts of why. They disagree about almost everything, except that the question is worth asking.

Go over something three times in one evening and it feels nailed down. Spread the same three sessions across a week and it feels shakier. Yet the spread-out version tends to win when it counts. The secret ingredient is a little bit of forgetting.

Dub the sound of one syllable onto a film of a mouth shaping another, and people report hearing a syllable that's on neither track. The trick is old, simple and stubborn, and it shows sight reaching into hearing.

Run your own fingers along your ribs and almost nothing happens. Let someone else do exactly the same thing and you squirm. The difference isn't in your skin. It's in a quiet forecast your brain makes every time you move.