There are many temptations to organize our life around the experience of earlier trauma. But that may short-change the future—which starts by our envisioning something better.
Some argue that music is an evolutionary accident. It seems likely, though, that such a powerfully emotional force must offer a concrete survival advantage
What we believe about ourselves depends less on what we think than what we do. To become a different person, first change your actions, and everything else will fall into place.
Though we’d like to think that we mold our beliefs to fit reality, often we do the reverse: to mold our perception of reality so that it fits with our beliefs, no matter how flimsy they may be.
Once, drugs and alcohol were addictive. Now the view is that you can get hooked on things like sex, sports, even rock music. It may sound like we're just making excuses for bad behavior, but there's a powerful urgency behind our beliefs about addiction.
What makes Everest the most dangerous mountain on Earth? Along with extreme cold, low oxygen, high winds, and bad weather, there's another, more elusive factor: the psychologically warping effect of the summit itself.
A person can be utterly overwhelmed by fear even though there's nothing organically wrong within his or her brain: complex systems can go off the rails despite every component working properly, a phenomenon of which ant colonies offer a vivid example.
Everything we see, touch, hear, or smell is infused with significance thanks to irresistible subconscious processes. We can’t help being immersed in meaning. But we can change what things mean.
New York City mayor and licensed pilot Michael Bloomberg recently described how he survived an inflight emergency. Could he really have done it without feeling any fear?
The Wrights’ “first airplane” was such a poor flyer that it barely qualified to be called an airplane at all. But it achieved something more important than flight.
I've never felt so flat-out dumb as I did that day. I'll never forget that horrible feeling of shame, seeping over me like hot acid, as I realized that I'd done something that could not easily be undone.
The company has striven to bind together every aspect of the internet experience, to achieve immortality through intrusiveness. And this, I think, will be their undoing.
The world is full of potential hazards. Unfortunately, the things that we're afraid of oftentimes aren't the things that are actually mostly likely to hurt us.
We will never know for sure what it would have been like to experience the last few minutes of the doomed flight, but the retrieved data allows us to make a pretty good guess.
What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.
Gerry Duffy, a rangy, chiseled 43-year-old from Ireland, ranks one of the most formidible endurance athletes in the world. But perhaps the most remarkable thing about him is that he used to be just like the rest of us.
If one addiction researcher's groundbreaking ideas are correct, then governments' plans tend to fall apart for the very same reason that our individual attempts at self-control do.
As we hand over more of our mental functions to our machines, we're lulled into dangerous complacency, losing track of where we are and what we're doing.
Coaches are forever asking us to give "110 percent." But scientists have discovered that we always have more to give, no matter what form of exertion we're undertaking. We can't consciously choose to tap it, however, because our minds have a subconscious self-limiting mechanism.
Some things seem innately healthful and good, even though they can kill you. Others seem inherently dangerous and unwholesome, even though they actually improve our quality of life. How do our subconscious minds decide what's good for us, and why do they lead us astray?
Storm chasers enjoying immersing themselves in a weather phenomenon as brutal and violent as a battlefield. Indeed, their activities may actively contribute to the death toll. Twelve years ago, I went storm-chasing and got caught up in the aftermath of a deadly F5 twister. There was one death in particular that made me forever question the morality of storm chasing.
Up until three weeks ago, Tom Durkin was hard at work, studying for the upcoming running of the Kentucky Derby. Then he called up his employers and tendered his resignation.
Humans and dogs have a way of intuiting one another’s emotions – of feeling like we know what the other is feeling -- that is unique among all the species on earth. But how they can achieve it is something of a biological puzzle.
It's the paradox of the internet age: never before has so much information been available so effortlessly, so quickly -- and never before has so much of it been completely erroneous. How do we decide what is true?