Look Around and Look Within

The Science and Art of Human Behavior

by Susan L. Smalley, Ph.D.

How often do you make a moral compromise?

We face moral decisions when an action conflicts with our internal intention or conviction of right and wrong. There can arise dilemmas with the simplest of intentions. Read More

Words as Living Organisms

A few days ago, I went to meet a business consultant in NYC. He sent me an email to meet him at a backdoor entrance of a well-known company so we could enter before it opened to the public. I easily found the front entrance but behind it there was no address that matched the one he had sent. Read More

Mind-wandering and mindfulness

If you haven't tried mindfulness meditation yet, you must. A new study by scientists at Yale and the University of Oregon just gave us another reason why. Read More

Willful Ignorance: Penn State and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

According to James Carse, Professor Emeritus at NYU, there are three kinds of ignorance: ordinary ignorance, willful ignorance, and higher ignorance. The first is the very essence of learning—you move from unknowing to knowing—like learning history, science, facts and trivia. The second type, willful ignorance, is when you know something but choose to pretend you do not. The thir Read More

When the Small become Large

I watched ‘48 Hours' investigate Amanda Knox's arrest, imprisonment, and release with a tiny sense of the horror she and her family have endured over the last four years. Her facial emotions revealed disbelief, curiosity, shock, fear, desperation, determination, and ultimately relief as she endured the murder trial, guilty verdict, appeal and freedom. Read More

To Seek or Not to Seek

I found myself saying words the other day that shocked me "I'm not seeking right now" were in response to a friend's questioning me about my interest (or lack thereof) in meeting her friend, a South American shaman who guides people in self-investigation. Read More

True Blood and True Life

I just spent the week with Sookie Stackhouse in Bon Temps, Louisiana. I had never seen an episode of True Blood until six days ago when I watched episode 1 season 1 on HBOGO on my ipad. Yesterday, I left Sookie screaming in the Finale of Season 4. Read More

Six Words of Wisdom

We all face a massive overload of words on a daily basis with eBooks, blogs, tweets, and texting. It makes the efficiency of the six-word novel even more enticing. The six-word novel is credited to Ernest Hemingway who is said to have written, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn" in the 1920s. Read More

Mindfulness and Equality

Equality to me is the end of ‘better than/less than' thinking. It begins with each human being recognizing that they are of equal value as anyone else - no more and no less. Our country's founding principles are based on the idea of equality but, in practice, actions are not always in line with it (e.g. slavery, gender, religious, race, discrimination, etc.). Read More

Giving attention to those we love: Paul Reiser shows us how

I grew up watching Father Knows Best - a sitcom in the 1950s where family life was pretty much ‘picture book perfect' but Father had to help make those big decisions that posed too much of a dilemma for Mother. Read More

When Fear Gets in Your Way

Ever feeling scared when about to give a public talk – whether that is a toast, a lecture or just asking a question in a room full of people? They say for many people giving a talk is more frightening than the idea of dying. Having suffered from performance anxiety myself, I know well the feeling. And while many people get nervous before public presentations, Read More

When coming to a fork in the road – take it (Yogi Berra)

Our three children are now in their 20s and exploring the diverse roads of life. By that I mean they are making decisions about whether to go to graduate school, what jobs to seek, and what career trajectories they might pursue. Read More

Look at Me: Living in a society of attention-seekers

I met a woman the other day who radiates contentment. She lives on a houseboat in London on the Thames and has a day job helping people give speeches. With a son and a long-time partner, she spends her time outside of work making things - like doors (for cupboards, entryways, etc.), or gardening her boat-top garden, or remodeling a boat for future travels. Read More

There are no random acts of kindness

I think it is a misnomer to describe acts of kindness as random; kindness arises with an intention to "be kind" followed by an action. While the acts may be directed toward anonymous people or animals, the person's act of kindness is anything but random -- it is deliberate and directional -- non-random in nature. Read More

Waking up is hard to do

About 8 years ago I had a personal ‘wake-up' call, an epiphany of sorts; one of those wake-ups where your view of the world shifts so radically and rapidly that there's a giant "Aha!" and a new conceptual framework (your relationship to the world) is born. In my case, it arose in response to a melanoma diagnosis that pushed me beyond the ‘edge of reason'. Read More

There's a way to meditate for everyone

The other night a husband and wife were asking me about meditation; the wife was a mediator and the husband was not. She clearly reaped great benefit from it and must have trying to get her husband to do it, but to no avail. Read More

The changing face of religion

When kindness is a mark of success

My family attended our son's graduation over the weekend at the University of Vermont where the commencement speaker was Eric K. Shinseki, United States Secretary of Veterans Affairs. Aside from delivering a short and rather entertaining speech, he got across a pretty simple message to the emerging graduates: the real mark of success is kindness, and sharing that with others. Read More

Do you eat for ‘entertainment’ or what?

The other day I heard a nutritionist say ‘eating is not a form of entertainment' to which my friend decried, ‘what? Are you kidding me?'. My friend calls herself a ‘foodie' - she loves eating in new restaurants, exploring the sensory experiences of food, and savoring the tastes and smells of the culinary experience. Food for me is really not entertainment; it's a form of nourishment and sustenance. I eat to keep my body healthy; of course, I love to ‘eat out' with friends but that's because of the social experience more than the food itself. I am not a ‘foodie'. Read More

Mindfulness and Carl Jung's Red Book

The other night I attended one of the Red Book Dialogues at the Hammer Museum in Westwood, California. The Dialogues are a series of discussions between a celebrity (last night was Helen Hunt) and a psychoanalyst or Jungian scholar (last night was James Hillman) around The Red Book, Carl Jung's personal journey into the mind. The Red Book is on display at the Hammer Museum through May. Read More

Mindfulness and Misquotes: Seeing what we want to see

Ever play telephone when you were a kid? The game of whispering a saying into one ear and watching it be morphed as it passes through a series of ‘neural networks' - different brains sitting around the kitchen table. The Internet provides a glimpse at this process with quotations as the object of attention. Read More

The certainty of uncertainty

I'm fascinated by human nature - why we think, feel and act the way we do - in both the extremes of good (e.g. Mother Theresa) and evil (e.g. Hitler) and in the every day ‘more regular' you or I. Read More

Susan L. Smalley, Ph.D., is a professor and behavior geneticist at UCLA Semel Institute and Founding Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC).

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