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She Taught Yale’s Most Popular Class Ever on Happiness. Then She Burned Out
Burnout isn't just for cubicle warriors and workaholic entrepreneurs. Nobel prize-winning geniuses and beloved celebrities burn out too. And so do experts on happiness, apparently. Yale psychologist Laurie Santos is famous for teaching the university's most popular class ever -- on happiness. Her insights on how to achieve the good life were so incredibly popular that they have even been turned into an online class taken by millions of people. If anyone should know how to maintain their psychological balance, it's Santos. But as she revealed to Time recently, the relentless stress of the pandemic even managed to burn her out.
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Adversarial Collaboration: An EDGE Lecture by Daniel Kahneman
... My first experience of an adversarial collaboration was about 40 years ago. My wife, Anne Treisman, and I were studying a new paradigm involving apparent motion and priming. It's a nice effect. There's a lot of work on it. And quite a few studies since have followed up on this work. Anne and I had many ideas, and we designed a large number of experiments, most of which succeeded. There was only one trouble. We didn't agree on the nature of the phenomenon, and we had different stories about the role of attention in the effect.
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In the Age of A.I., Major in Being Human
Last summer, a piece of artwork generated with artificial intelligence took a first prize at the Colorado State Fair. To me, the image looks like a view from the back of the stage at an opera. You see the backs of three singers, then, past them, vague squiggles and forms that may or may not be an audience, and all around, dominating everything, the fantastical Lord of the Rings-style palace where they are performing. The artwork looks cool at first glance, but after a second it feels kind of lifeless. “As I came back to the image and sat with it for a while, I found that my efforts to engage it at depth were thwarted,” L.M. Sacasas wrote in his newsletter on technology and culture.
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Is Cheating Just a Symptom (and Not the Cause) of Declining Relationships?
Podcast: Researchers found that relationship functioning starts to decline before infidelity happens. The lead author of this study, Olga Stavrova, explains these findings
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New Research From Clinical Psychological Science
A sample of research on the importance of independent empirical evidence, mapping racial/ethnic disparities in youth psychiatric emergencies, the effects collective trauma, and much more.
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What Causes Déjà Vu?
It’s an eerie feeling: You walk into a place you know you’ve never been before but are overwhelmed by a sense of familiarity—a memory you can’t quite reach. Has this all happened before? Most people experience this sensation, known as déjà vu, at some point in their lives. It’s a hard feeling to study, though, because it tends to arise spontaneously and be shaken off easily, scientists say. Re-creating it on command in a laboratory is tricky business. Nevertheless, scientists think that déjà vu actually provides a peek into how the memory system works when it goes a little off-kilter.
