Cognition

To successfully manage stress and anxiety, you must learn to recognize and neutralize you habitual emotional reactivity. Mindfulness Meditation offers the tools for doing this, and you can learn mindfulness meditation therapy online through a personalized email correspondence course. Read More

Last month (October 2009), Science magazine devoted an entire extraordinary issue to what may be our oldest ancestor: Ardipithecus ramidus. Ardipithecus ramidus, with its small cranial capacity and mix of primitive and derived traits, sits about where it should on the hominid family tree, in both time and space. The same cannot be said for the fossil known as the "Hobbit" (LB1), representing a putative new species, Homo floresiensis. Separated by almost 4 million years and thousands of miles, what do these species tell us about human brain evolution? Read More

Medical school is like entering a grocery store and memorizing the names of every product in the store, their number and location, every ingredient in every product in the order in which they appear on the food label, then doing the same thing in every grocery store in the city. Read More

Want to Learn? Sleep!...Want to Learn by Observation? Sleep Early!... Read More

One of my patients suffers from chronic constipation due to irritable bowel syndrome. During the literally twenty years since she was first diagnosed, her symptom pattern has remained remarkably consistent: she has perhaps 1-2 bowel movements per week, occasionally accompanied by some mild cramping. Even she admits the symptoms are more a bother than a worry. And yet, every time I prescribe a new medicine for one of her other ailments, within a day or two she calls me up complaining that it's causing her to become constipated. Read More

Freud said that whether we intend it or not, we're all poets. That's because on most nights, we dream. And dreams are lot like poetry, in that in both things, we express our internal life in similar ways. We use images more than words; we combine incongruent elements to evoke emotion in a more efficient way than wordier descriptions can; and we use unconscious and tangential associations rather than logic to tell a story. Read More

A woman falls down an open manhole while talking on her cell phone. A train operator misses the signals and causes an accident while texting. Pilots fail to notice signals from their plane for an hour and a half while playing with their computers. When people become oblivious to the world, they make potentially disastrous mistakes. How can people miss manholes, train signals, and airports? Read More

A reader posted the following response to an earlier discussion of mine. He said, "We can't turn back time, we need to adapt." But adaptation is many things. Sometimes when we adapt it's good for us - biologically and psychologically. And sometimes it's bad for us. I'd like to discuss different types of adaptation. This discussion forms part of the argument for smaller cities, fewer people, and bigger nature. Read More

Divided responses to the Fort Hood Killings illurate how reality follows perception, and how the United States is hopelessly split. Read More