I published this story at the beginning of 2017, ostensibly as a way to promote my book. But I keep coming back to read it because the study is just so astounding. It’s one of those wonderful moments in science where the tiniest tweak unlocks a whole new world. If you read science magazines – and […]
Psychology
Today marks the publication of yet another study telling us that our screens are making us miserable. Psychologist Jean Twenge at San Diego State University looked at survey results from more than a million U.S. 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-graders and found that those who spent more than an hour a day gazing into the rectangular […]
Well now then. Here we are. The first day of another year. What to do about that? January 1 is a day for looking forward. Kids mostly look forward, I think. But any adult knows you make sense of any given situation only by looking back, by remembering. Memory allows the comparison between then and […]
I started crying while doing the dishes last week. Domestic weeping of this kind used to be rarer for me before the Trump election, but I am afraid it is all too common now since, like everyone else, I listen to the news while I do housework. In this case, for once, it was happy […]
Ann: Please meet Adam Rogers. He wrote a story about DARPA looking for solutions to the credibility problems of social science, only what I’m calling “solutions to credibility problems,” he called bullshit detection. First, social science’s credibility problems. Here’s the way I said it in 2015: Start with any question involving human behavior or motivation and […]
Over the past few months, I’ve spoken to a number of groups about the power of belief in medicine as a part of promoting my book, Suggestible You. It’s been a fascinating process and I’ve loved hearing about people’s individual experience with placebos, self-healing and alternative medicine. But I often asked a simple question: what […]
I am a man of science. Okay, perhaps not of science, but certainly near it. I’m science adjacent. But regardless, I consider myself to be bound, in the end, by logic and facts. As such, I like to think that I eschew my beliefs for what the facts tell me. As a very young man, I was […]
My eight-year-old daughter is a fourth-generation perfectionist. In my family, the trait is matrilineal, so I know from firsthand experience that it has a few advantages. My daughter is likely to pay her bills on time and use semicolons correctly. She will not be intimidated by details. She will have a certain baseline competence that will make her […]
