Matter Over Mind

The New York Times:

Over the next few weeks, this blog may have a distinct Harvard bias. This is not only because I am kissing up to the alpha school, but recently I had a fantastic visit to the Harvard Decision Science Lab, run by Jennifer Lerner, and I got to meet several of the researchers there.

For example, I got to hear Amy Cuddy of the Harvard Business School, describe her research. I pause to describe Cuddy’s background because I’ve been struck by the number of people I meet in the general field of brain and behavioral research who have suffered some form of personal trauma.

Daniel Kahneman is one of the several senior figures in the field who survived the Holocaust. Nassim Taleb, of Black Swan fame, had his homeland, Lebanon, ravaged by war. Dan Ariely, the prominent behavioral scientist, was badly burned while serving in the Israeli military. Cuddy was a student at the University of Colorado at Boulder who suffered severe head trauma as a result of a horrible traffic accident in Wyoming.

Read the whole story: The New York Times