Dispatches on science and scientists, culture, politics, and neurodiversity by Steve Silberman, investigative reporter for Wired and other national magazines.

Brené Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame.

ref. jiaxi li

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

Why does Adele's 'Someone Like You' make everyone cry? Science has found the formula

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.

Fascinating New Yorker profile of neuroscientist David Eagleman and his work about the nature of time. Wide-ranging article that discusses his interactions with Francis Crick and Brian Eno, his study about drummers and the creation of possibilianism.

Improve your self-image by "rewriting your history."

You "loiter" in the past at your own peril.

Michael W. Otto, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology at Boston University. He is author of the book, Exercise for Mood and Anxiety: Proven Strategies for Overcoming Depression and Enhancing Well-Being.

The Flynn effect is the name given to a substantial and long-sustained increase in intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world.

The Flynn effect has always been tinged with mystery. First popularized by the political scientist James Flynn, the effect refers to the widespread increase in IQ scores over time.

Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists -- that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is.

rnj robert jesse

What the love of honey has to do with ancient wisdom, our capacity for hope, and the future of technology.

About the HSP Newsletter

In 1996, shortly after The Highly Sensitive Person was published, we began a newsletter called Comfort Zone. It has become the center of a special "HSP" community, so we were glad to make it a free online newsletter in 2004

Elaine Aaron

summer reading about the science of the mind

Lumosity works with leading scientists to bring the latest innovations in cognitive improvement out of the lab and into your home.

The psychedelic drug in magic mushrooms may have lasting medical and spiritual benefits, according to new research from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

Psych Central is the Internet's largest and oldest independent mental health and psychology network.

Arnon Rolnick, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and past president of the Israeli Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback and member of the Board of the Israeli Psychological Association. His expertise in stress management is based on almost 20 years of working with elite military units as a senior psychologist in the Israeli Navy and head of the Biofeedback and Human Performance Laboratory.

Eloquently argued and engagingly written, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life provides a compelling missing link between theory of mind and the need for God

Brain Awareness Week (BAW) is the global campaign to increase public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. Every March, BAW unites the efforts of universities, hospitals, patient groups, government agencies, schools, service organizations, and professional associations worldwide in a week-long celebration of the brain.  Founded and coordinated by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and European Dana Alliance for the Brain, BAW's sixteenth annual  celebration will take place from March 14-20, 2011.

I started this list in the late 1980's and put it on the web in 1995.
It's since been adopted and adapted onto many pages since then. Please don't ask me about curing phobias because I know little about them. My interest is in the names only.
All the phobia names on this list have been found in some reference book.

In her new book, an MIT professor shares her ambivalence about the overuses of technology, which, she writes, "proposes itself as the architect of our intimacies."

Jung Typology Test™

How Music and Territory Make Us Who We are

Dr. Seligman's main mission has been the promotion of the field of Positive Psychology. This discipline includes the study of positive emotion, positive character traits, and positive institutions.

Martin Seligman talks about psychology -- as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become?

The common statistical thread between psychiatric diagnosis and grad school rankings.

Caring for Your Introvert
The habits and needs of a little-understood group
@jasonfried This Atlantic article nails what it's like to be an introvert in an extrovert's world: http://bit.ly/c2waSI

making connections where none previously existed

Understanding the power of birth order
What makes your children so different from one another?

Forgiveness education as one path toward peace is catching on worldwide, as seen in the recent requests for our educational materials from educators and psychologists in such areas as Iran, Rwanda, Colombia, Nigeria, Korea, and others. Is forgiveness a major factor in bringing about peace? This is a scientific question, and with enough time and perseverance, we should be able to answer it

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths and virtues that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The Positive Psychology Center promotes research, training, education, and the dissemination of Positive Psychology. This field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

A long-term follow-up study of 290 hospitalized patients with borderline personality disorder--characterized by unstable interpersonal relationships, chronic unhappiness, frequent changes in mood, cognitive distortions, and marked impulsivit--revealed that 10 years after hospitalization, 86 percent of the patients had sustained symptom remissions.

Pronunciation: [a-poe-FEE-nee-uh]

apophenia (plural apophenias)
(psychology) The perception of or belief in connectedness among unrelated phenomena.

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad,[1] who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

The new DSM-5 draft is out (and it appears the APA is finally dropping the silly roman numeral designations). Analysis is starting to pour in from around the country about the ramifications of the new diagnoses and proposed changes

A product of the Integrated Design Laboratory at Korea’s Ajou University, the map is a rare application of information design to the fields of psychology and sociology — and a brave effort to capture something as vague and abstract as personality visually and concretely

Cognitive Daily reports nearly every day on fascinating peer-reviewed developments in cognition from the most respected scientists in the field.

... Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
by George A. Miller
originally published in The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97
(reproduced here, with the author's permission, by Stephen Malinowski)

Chris Lastovicka designs music dealing primarily with psychological and metaphysical subjects.

ref: alexgardner

Mathematicians will tell you that the only way to learn math is to do math. Lots of it. The same is true in music and sports. While with math you quickly find out whether you’re right or wrong at a very atomic level with each problem you try to solve, with music a student listens to a song many times before she tries to emulate it — and then gets feedback on a note-by-note basis

One of the big problems is how we converse. Typing still leaves something to be desired as a communication tool; it lacks the nuances that can be expressed by body language and voice inflection. "Online, people can't see the yawn," says Patricia Wallace, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth and author of "The Psychology of the Internet."

direct evidence that a person's mental state can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The research also suggests that a more comprehensive approach is needed for mapping brain activity and that the widely held belief that localized areas of the brain are responsible for specific mental functions is misleading and incorrect.

If it takes only 50 milliseconds for users to form an aesthetic opinion of your site’s credibility and trustworthiness, are designers who create visually compelling sites simply wasting time and treasure on graphic indulgences? Patrick Lynch doesn't think so.