Five editions on, the DSM shoulders more responsibilities than it was ever intended for. How did we get here?

DM Good morning. It seems "non-local consciousness" is an oxymoron, ...perhaps the ultimate one?   (Per one of our related past conversations on the topic). Somewhat related to Eastern "wherever you go, there you are." Good morning! What a wonderfully sharp observation. You've cut right to the heart of a conceptual confusion that permeates much of the "non-local consciousness" discourse . The insight is this: consciousness, by its very nature, is always experienced from a p

Will AI stretch our minds—or stunt them?

Lessons my terminal cancer has taught me about the mind Related Post

Consumerism and the addiction economy are undermining the republic. Related More

More than 800 U.S. TikTok users shared their data with The Washington Post. We used it to find out why some people become power users, spending hours per day scrolling.

DM Did we hijack "America?" It seems we, the media, societies, and now A.I. have forgotten what was/is simply basic elementary school geography. That is, "America" consists of three areas: north, central and south. Each of these are comprised of multiple countries. However, the United States has changed (usurped, stolen?) its name to being America, and seems to have forgotten all the rest of the "Amercian Countries." Your thoughts and perspectives on this matter? Is this sim

For many of us, navigating the end of a relationship is one of the hardest things we will ever do. This week, we conclude our Love 2.0 series with psychologist Antonio Pascual-Leone, who shares the most common mistakes we make when it comes to splitting up, and techniques that can help us ease the pain. Then, our latest edition of Your Questions Answered. Cognitive scientist Phil Fernbach returns to respond to listeners’ thoughts and questions about the “illusion of knowledge

DM Are you familiar with "terror management theory," and if so, please provide your understandings and perspectives. I am indeed familiar with terror management theory, and I'd be happy to walk you through this fascinating psychological framework. Terror management theory, often abbreviated as TMT, emerged in the 1980s from the work of social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. The theory attempts to answer a profound question: how do human bei

Sleeping less doesn’t make you more productive. It just makes you more tired.

America is facing a war on whimsy, and we are losing ground daily. A monster pervades this nation, stealing sleep from schoolkids, tearing down national treasures and locking us in our homes to toil behind computer screens: efficiency. We have marched to the anthem of productivity since the Industrial Revolution; we think of children working away with coal-slathered faces in factories and believe we have evolved as a society. But I posit that as soon as we pilfered the chisel

In a new book, Wharton's Jerry Wind and his co-authors argue that creativity is a learnable skill that becomes more powerful when paired with intelligent machines.

When making any tough decision, the key is not to be overly exploratory or exploitative.

Where commentary on moms’ satisfaction goes wron g

The author spent days in a room with no light. Who would he be when he emerged?

Business professor Christian Busch makes the case that serendipity is a skill, resulting from a mindset that allows you to see and act on opportunities in seemingly unrelated facts or events.

Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki explains that whether we are dealing with business, politics, or personal matters, it’s possible — and advantageous — to train ourselves to be more empathic.

How does the paideía of the Chinese tech elite differ from their counterparts in Silicon Valley?

DM As many wise people have shared, across a variety of contexts, human social attentiveness and caring (aka: compassion) diminishes as a function of "distance" (broadly defined in numerous ways, not only physical). In other words, self-care and immediate family care typically reside at our "care epicenter," ...while our "extended concern, attention and care" for all others suffers varying degrees of decline, thus encompasses incremental reduction of moral social thought, ac

Demand for cultural commentary is higher than it’s ever been—but now that commentary is coming from unconventional new sources.