Happiness Without Getting What You Want
Who says we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want? According to Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert, our "psychological immune system" lets us feel real, enduring happiness even when things don't go as planned. This kind of happiness -- "synthetic happiness," Gilbert calls it -- is "every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aimi... posted on Sep 22 2009, 5,579 reads

Voluntary Simplicity
While working for the think-tank, Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), Duane Elgin co-authored the following report with Arnold Mitchell in 1976 for the Business Intelligence Program. Titled Voluntary Simplicity, this was the most popular report published to that date by the program and it stirred national interest in the theme of simplicity. This in-depth article is an updated ver... posted on Aug 12 2009, 4,496 reads

Best Online Psychology Tests
Want to know what's really going on in your own head? This NY Times post offers a list of the best online psychology tests, some of which are used to collect data for research experiments, while others are skill tests or quizzes that offer personal insights. A few of the best include a fun test that measures how fast and flexible a thinker you are by using color-coded words and an "I Just Get Myse... posted on Aug 10 2009, 8,558 reads

The Death of Why?
The phrase "knowledge is power" is a cliche in our culture. Yet as often as we hear it from others or speak it ourselves, how often have we contemplated the process of acquiring knowledge? Is there a blueprint for obtaining knowledge and wisdom? Are we encouraging children to be intellectually curious or merely teaching them that every question has an instant and obvious answer? In her book, The D... posted on Jul 23 2009, 3,152 reads

Why Fiction Can Be Good For You
"For more than two thousand years people have insisted that reading fiction is good for you. Aristotle claimed that poetry -- he meant the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which we would now call fiction -- is a more serious business than history. History, he argued, tells us only what has happened, whereas fiction tells us what can happen, which can stretch... posted on Jul 06 2009, 4,469 reads

Video Games vs. The Aging Brain
In his twenties, Mike Merzenich dreamed of mapping the neurobiology of the soul. "I was interested in the genesis of the self," he says. Four decades later, he has scaled back his ambitions. Now a graying 64, he hopes merely to reverse the toll of aging on the brain and cure schizophrenia. Without surgery or drugs. Merzenich, a neuroscience professor at the University of California at San Francisc... posted on Jun 30 2009, 4,702 reads

The Limits of Control
"My mother had always feared domestic animals, but now as a plump neighborhood cat ran up our driveway, she gazed at the feline, and revealed that 70 years ago she had had a pet cat. Her 87-year-old eyes teared up. Her cat was white, she said, and so thin you could see its ribs. Still, she loved to cuddle it. It wasn't a house cat -- it couldn't have been, because she was imprisoned at the time, i... posted on Jun 28 2009, 4,021 reads

What Mowing the Lawn Can Teach
"As I surveyed the front lawn, I realized, to my surprise, that it really did look better with a diagonal cut. If left to my own devices, I would have mowed the lawn in an ever-decreasing spiral starting with the outside edges. That's the way I'd seen others mow their lawns. It would have been more efficient, perhaps. But it would not have been pleasing to the eye, and it would not have showed the... posted on Jun 18 2009, 3,759 reads

Dipped in Original Wisdom
"High in the Andes live the Aymarans. A tribe born with their toes dipped in original wisdom. They place the future at their backs and face their past with the intentness of a woman scanning a mirror for wrinkles or chin hair. An Aymaran gestures over his shoulder to indicate next year and will point straight ahead if you need directions to yesterday. ... I know in my old bones that sing their ach... posted on Jun 16 2009, 3,884 reads

The Power of Place
"A bit of unaccustomed reflection on one dimension of our experience suggests that the answer to that perennial child's question: If grown-ups know so much, why aren't they happy?--is increasingly bound up with the places in which we spend our lives. Many, of the eclectic researches that support this commonsensical idea are less discoveries than rediscoveries of principles that our forebears consi... posted on Jun 14 2009, 3,889 reads