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Here’s why Elizabeth Koch, the daughter of a GOP megadonor, chose science over politics
Elizabeth Koch is obsessed with the self—not just hers, but yours and mine, too. She’s the founder of a neuroscience nonprofit called the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, which aims “to understand the nature of consciousness and its place in nature.” There, researchers are working on figuring out the physical processes underlying the mental experience of existence. They’re trying to uncover the mechanics of mind and matter, asking how the two work together to produce a sense of self. --- To change, Koch had to train herself to care again, to pay attention to all that had been causing her pain and that she’d been trying to ignore.
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The Joy of Giving Lasts Longer Than the Joy of Getting
The happiness we feel after a particular event diminishes each time we experience it, but giving to others may be the exception to the rule.
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The best doesn’t exist. A psychologist explains why we can’t stop searching.
Given that we live in a consumer culture where you can get anything — a T-shirt, fancy whiskey, blood pressure medication — delivered to your door within hours, it is surprisingly difficult to buy things. Do you want jeans? What type of jeans do you want? Will those jeans look good on you? Why didn’t you buy jeans that look better? Also, isn’t $148 a lot to pay for jeans? Maybe they’ll go on sale later. Maybe you’ll find better jeans if you try harder. All you want is the best jeans, and is that so wrong?
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Oh my: a psychological approach to awe – Science Weekly podcast
When it comes to emotions, words such as joy, anger and disgust immediately spring to mind. But in recent years, psychologists have been turning their attention to a lesser-studied emotion: awe. Whether it’s a breathtaking landscape or a glorious sunset, this research is painting awe, and the effects it has on us, as potentially one of the most important in our emotional repertoire. But what might be going on psychologically? How might these effects have helped our ancestors? And could we all do with more awe?
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New tech promises to predict your moods. That might not be a good thing
If your phone could warn you of impending stormy internal weather, you could theoretically do the emotional equivalent of grabbing an umbrella on a cloudy day to ensure you don’t get doused later. That’s the basic idea behind a number of new technologies, many still in development, that attempt to predict emotions based on certain biomarkers. Psychologists and technologists are together trying to build emotional databases that teach machines how to read human feelings by compiling a bunch of data about biological signals that indicate impending changes in order to digitally predict moods.
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How culture shapes your mind — and your mental illness
THE PATIENT, A man in his early 20s, was clearly distressed, anxious. There were insects, he said, insects crawling around under his skin. The graduate student doing the initial assessment was immediately concerned and went straight to her advisor, Dr. Brian Sharpless, a clinical psychologist and professor at Argosy University in Virginia. The patient sounded psychotic — possibly schizophrenic, she said, and she wanted to know what to do. “Is he by any chance Nigerian?” Sharpless asked. “Yes!” she replied. “How did you know?” “He’s not psychotic — that’s Ode Ori,” Sharpless responded.
