The Mathematics of Being Nice
Cooperation is interesting because it essentially means that you help someone else, someone who is a potential competitor. You reduce your own success in order to increase the success of somebody else. Why should you do that? Why should natural selection favour such behavior? To answer these questions, Martin Nowak highlights 5 types of humans cooperation via evolutionary dynamics and experimental... posted on Apr 07 2011, 12,371 reads

Trading Wall Street for the Simple Life
He was a successful currency trader handling a $15 billion portfolio. But something wasn't right. So Henry Quinson walked away from his comfortable life, gave his savings to charity, and joined a rural monastery in France. "I thought the spiritual part of my human life was more important than a career or making money," he explains. For six years, Quinson spent his days in silence and prayer, follo... posted on Apr 06 2011, 3,795 reads

Quiet Justice: Teaching Mindfulness to Lawyers
"When I tell people that I teach a class in law and meditation at UC Berkeley's law school, I often hear snorts of disbelief," Charles Halpern laughs. But the class is no joke. It's part of a groundbreaking movement that has quietly been taking hold in the legal profession over the past two decades: a movement to bring mindfulness into the practice of law and legal education. To a career that tops... posted on Mar 31 2011, 12,988 reads

Go Easy on Yourself, New Research Says
Do you treat yourself as well as you treat your friends and family? That simple question is the basis for a burgeoning new area of psychological research that looks at how kindly people view themselves. New research suggests that giving ourselves a break and accepting our imperfections may be the first step towards better health. Those who score high on tests of self-compassion have less depressio... posted on Mar 26 2011, 6,268 reads

Sleep Helps Us Remember What We Need To
You may have heard it before. While we sleep, our brains replay and store the days events into our long-term memories. But it can't keep everything. Of the deluge of information that pass through us each day, how do our minds "decide" what to keep and what to dump? Why can we replay the disagreement with a spouse or the promising job interview, but forget what we ate for breakfast or where we put ... posted on Mar 21 2011, 7,140 reads

Football and Meditation with Running Back, Ricky Williams
Picture one of the NFL's most spellbinding figures sitting serenely in a room, meditating. Every Wednesday, Miami Dolphins running back Ricky Williams leads an open meditation session in a quiet college classroom where he's working on his degree. Williams meditates every morning, before practices, and before he heads into the stadium on game day. "For me, [meditation] is like food. It's spiritual ... posted on Mar 18 2011, 2,859 reads

Squeeze Out Your Creative Juices
John Cleese, a humorous and wise personality, discusses how to unleash the creativity that every individual possesses. Among his witty and insightful points include shifting activities when we get stuck, staying clear of distractions, and carving out space and time away from the daily to-do list to just explore. Ultimately, he notes, tapping into our unconscious mind may be the key to unraveling i... posted on Mar 10 2011, 7,099 reads

8 Weeks to a Better Brain
A pause in a busy day, meditation can be like the eye of a storm. For centuries, there's been no logic to it. Yet more and more, researchers are beginning to map its effects on the brain. In a recent study, a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers become the first to document meditation-produced changes over time in the brain's gray matter. Their conclusion? Participating in an eight-week mind... posted on Mar 07 2011, 13,010 reads

The Power of Touch
A pat on the back, a caress of the arm--these are everyday, incidental gestures that we usually take for granted. But after years spent immersed in the science of touch, University of California, Berkeley, psychology professor Dacher Keltner has found that the power of touch is much more profound than we usually realize. In this Greater Good magazine essay, he argues that touch is our primary lang... posted on Feb 24 2011, 43,740 reads

Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test-an annual battle between the world's most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people. The objective? To find out whether a computer can act "more human" than a person. In his own quest to beat the machines, the author discovers that the march of technology isn't just changing how we ... posted on Feb 14 2011, 2,959 reads