"I think exploration and adventure are essential to the happiness of every person, but I can't presume to present this as anything but my own opinion. Most people are pre-naturally more happy than I am, out the gate."

Ask somebody a difficult question, and chances are they will either look up at the sky or close their eyes.  What is going on there? 

Creativity is commonly thought of as a personality trait that resides within the individual. We count on creative people to produce the songs, movies, and books we love; to invent the new gadgets that can change our lives; and to discover the new scientific theories and philosophies that can change the way we view the world. Over the past several years, however, social psychologists have discovered that creativity is not only a characteristic of the individual, but may also change depending on the situation and context. The question, of course, is what those situations are: what makes us more creative at times and less creative at others? One answer is psychological distance.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner. How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition—including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead—evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence.

John Seddon explains why targets make organisations worse and controlling costs makes costs higher. This elegant dissection of the organisational madness that pervades our culture was given at the 2009 conference of the Human Givens Institute.

We frequently confuse internal biochemistry (caused by habits and genetics) with external events. If we didn't, marketing wouldn't work nearly as well.

In his new best-selling book, "The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite," Kessler, a San Francisco Bay Area pediatrician, explains why certain foods loaded with fat, sugar and salt exert such a pull, despite our best intentions to avoid them. As he discusses the biology that leads to scarfing down a plate of fries, he delves into such puzzles as why the French fry binger is more likely to remember the pleasant stimulation of the fries' salt, fat, texture and flavor than the stomachache and self-recrimination that follow it.

Easterlin offered an appealing resolution to his paradox, arguing that only relative income matters to happiness. Other explanations suggest a “hedonic treadmill,” in which we must keep consuming more just to stay at the same level of happiness. Either way, the policy implications of the Paradox are huge, as they suggest that economic growth may not raise well-being by much. Given the stakes in this debate, Betsey Stevenson and I thought it worth reassessing the evidence. We have re-analyzed all of the relevant post-war data, and also analyzed the particularly interesting new data from the Gallup World Poll. Last Thursday we presented our research at the latest Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, and we have arrived at a rather surprising conclusion: There is no Easterlin Paradox.

In recent years, cognitive scientists have turned in increasing numbers to the study of human happiness, and one of their central findings is that we are not very good at predicting how happy or unhappy something will make us. Given time, survivors of tragedies and traumas report themselves nearly as happy as they were before, and people who win the lottery or achieve lifelong dreams don't see any long-term increase in happiness.

MIT research shows that 40% of creative teams productivity is directly explained by the amount of communication they have with others to discover, gather, and internalise information. In other MIT studies, research shows that employees with the most extensive digital networks are 7% more productive than their colleagues. Furthermore, those with the most cohesive face-to-face networks are 30% more productive. This reinforces similar research by Aral, Brynjolfsson & Van Alstyne [3] that highlights the importance of these networks because they “strongly influence information diffusion … and access to novel information”. Availability of these networks, their research shows, is a highly significant predictor of worker productivity.

Buoyed by two runaway bestsellers, "Blink" and "The Tipping Point," Gladwell has positioned himself as a roving ambassador between cultural and corporate America, penetrating boardrooms and living rooms, providing bullet points for cocktail parties and management seminars, and changing not just the things we talk about but the way we talk about them. But in this new era of belt-tightening, everyone must expect some cost-benefit analysis, and so, in our best consultant-speak, we ask: How much value does Malcolm Gladwell really add?

Objective truth is no longer significant in discussions of political and social matters. _True Enough_ is about how this has happened, and what it looks like. We hear the phrase "marketplace of ideas" quite a bit; Farhad digs into work by psychologists and sociologists to uncover why it is that it is a marketplace in which bad ideas drive out good. I think it's a fascinating book that's full of interesting ideas, and I think these are ideas that we need to be talking about.

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes.

Step out of your problem-solving role Whether we’re improving what we make, how we make it, or how we share it, we normally take the perspective of the creator by default. We can’t help it. We’re drawn into decisions about all sorts of details. We love the minutia—solving problems, finding a way around a limitation. We don’t try to see past our own role in the process. The field of user experience (UX) helps us change that. UX practitioners examine the everyday lives of the people we endeavor to help.

Can money buy you happiness? Yes—so long as you spend the money on someone else. According to new research, giving other people even as little as $5 can lead to increased well-being for the giver.

"Today I want to bring to your attention an approach you can use personally if you really haven't a clue what you are meant to do -- if you don't even know where to start. It's an exercise in acquiring self-knowledge, designed by Otto Scharmer's Presencing Institute."

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule “I” appears only in English.

A professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his book, Predictably Irrational, clearly sets out the behaviouralists' argument that average people are all far more irrational and more human than economists allow.

Gen Y is taking over. The generation of young adults that's composed of the children of Boomers, Generation Jones, and even some Gen X'ers, is the biggest generation since the Baby Boomers and three times the size of Gen X. As the Boomers fade into retire

If you want people to use less energy, you could make it very expensive--or you could just let them know how much they use in comparison with their neighbors. When that bit of information was added to electric bills in San Marcos, Calif., heavy users quic

If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--ri

A great way to cut down on the amount of time spent online is by creating an internet ritual.

Many people don’t feel motivated at work, and there’s a very simple explanation for this: The motivational techniques used by most managers don’t work.

Why do Americans spend so much time and money performing menial tasks when they don't have to? What's with all the knitting, gardening, and — as the Census Bureau dubs it — "cooking for fun"? Why do we fill our hours with leisure activities that look

Isn’t it puzzling that so many middle-aged Americans are spending so much of their time and money performing menial labors when they don’t have to? Just as the radio and phonograph proved to be powerful substitutes for the piano, the forces of technol

"The main idea of our column is that “talent” is overrated; that practice really does make perfect; and that it’s a good idea to do what you truly love in life, because if you don’t, you probably won’t work hard enough at it to get really good."

"The idea that we could better understand ourselves by looking at how we employ technology was and remains the driving force of my work as a journalist."