New Books in Psychology
1,051 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 9 hours ago - ★★★★ - 44 ratingsInterviews with Psychologists about their New Books
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Episodes
Russell T. Warne, "In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 24, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesIn this episode I talked to Russell T. Warne about his book In the Know: Debunking 35 Myths about Human Intelligence (Cambridge UP, 2020). Warne takes on the “nature versus nurture” debate regarding the source of intelligence. It also looks at a host of other angles related to IQ: from the failures of the No Child Left Behind act to what are the disadvantages to society are of an emerging intellectual meritocracy. Along the way it explores differences in scores based on ethnic/racial origins...
Alicia Puglionesi, "Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science" (Stanford UP, 2020)
December 18, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesSéances, clairvoyance, and telepathy captivated public imagination in the United States from the 1850s well into the twentieth century. Though skeptics dismissed these experiences as delusions, a new kind of investigator emerged to seek the science behind such phenomena. With new technologies like the telegraph collapsing the boundaries of time and space, an explanation seemed within reach. As Americans took up psychical experiments in their homes, the boundaries of the mind began to waver. C...
Steven W. Webster, "American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 17, 2020 09:00 - 34 minutesToday I talked to Steven W. Webster about his book American Rage: How Anger Shapes Our Politics (Cambridge UP, 2020). We discuss the behavioral implications of anger in American politics, from increased intolerance, blame, and aggression, to an ever-deepening lack of trust in government’s efficacy. Among the topics addressed was the role of the media and internet in stoking anger, and how democratic norms are threatened by partisan taunting and the way anger invites narrow loyalty to party ov...
Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer, "Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age" (U Minnesota Press, 2020)
December 17, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourTwentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the b...
Mithu Sanyal, "Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo" (Verso, 2019)
December 11, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesMy guest today, author Mithu Sanyal, describes the topic of rape as a ‘cultural sore spot,’ one that requires yet eludes wide conversation. Her latest book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo (Verso, 2019), bravely starts this conversation. It covers the history of rape as well as of our divergent and misguided conceptions for it, and it addresses the topic’s intersection with matters of gender stereotypes and racism. We unpack these topics in our interview, along with the psychological phenomena ...
Erica Fretwell, "Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling" (Duke UP, 2020)
December 11, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWe so often take our senses as natural, but perhaps we should understand them as historically situated. Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020) allows us to reconsider the history of psychophysics and psychology through the lens of sensory studies and to rethinking science in the context of racial capitalism. Breathing new life into nineteenth century psychophysics, Erica Fretwell presents a history of how science, technology, and l...
John Campbell, "Causation in Psychology" (Harvard UP, 2020)
December 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourOur practices of holding people morally and legally responsible for what they do rests on causal relationships between our mental states and our actions – a desire for revenge or a fear for one’s safety may cause a violent act. In either case, John Campbell argues, there is a psychological causal process that leads from the motivating mental state to the action. In Causation in Psychology (Harvard University Press, 2020), Campbell – who is professor of philosophy at the University of Californ...
Richard S. Balkin, "Practicing Forgiveness: A Path Toward Healing" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 10, 2020 09:00 - 54 minutesOur relationships enrich our lives. Strong bonds with family, friends, and colleagues make our lives full and vibrant, but they can also be a source of distress or even trauma. Few relationships are perfect, and we often find ourselves let down by even the people we count on most; learning to navigate the challenges is vital to protecting our health and wellbeing. In this book the author presents a model for forgiveness that addresses how we either repair relationships when someone has harmed...
Ellen Van Oosten, "Helping People Change: Coaching with Compassion for Lifelong Learning and Growth" (HBR Press, 2019)
December 10, 2020 09:00 - 36 minutesOn this episode I speak to Ellen Van Oosten about Helping People Change: Coaching with Compassion for Lifelong Learning and Growth (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019). The book explores both personal and organizational change, especially how does a leader pursue an ideal self that aligns activities, goals and values. Key emotions include awe, joy, curiosity and gratitude, with the latter emotion having a strong social, connective focus. The key is self-awareness and making the effort to cha...
Jack Drescher, "Psychotherapeutic Engagements With LGBTQ+ Patients and Their Families" (American Psychiatric Association, 2020)
December 10, 2020 09:00 - 53 minutesIn this episode, Philip Lance interviews Jack Drescher, a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who is an expert in psychotherapy with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patients. The interview focuses on a recently published series articles about LGBT mental health in an online journal of the American Psychiatric Association. The LGBT population group is heterogeneous, meaning that differences among the members of this group are as important as the similarities. In many ways, psychotherapy for...
A. Espay and B. Stecher, "Brain Fables: The Hidden History of Neurodegenerative Diseases and a Blueprint to Conquer Them" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
December 04, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAn estimated 80 million people live with a neurodegenerative disease, with this number expected to double by 2050. Despite decades of research and billions in funding, there are no medications that can slow, much less stop, the progress of these diseases. The time to rethink degenerative brain disorders has come. With no biological boundaries between neurodegenerative diseases, illnesses such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's result from a large spectrum of biological abnormalities, hampering ef...
Richard Seymour, "The Twittering Machine" (Verso, 2020)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourFormer social media executives tell us that the system is an addiction-machine. We are users, waiting for our next hit as we like, comment and share. We write to the machine as individuals, but it responds by aggregating our fantasies, desires and frailties into data, and returning them to us as a commodity experience. The Twittering Machine (Verso, 2020) is an unflinching view into the calamities of digital life: the circus of online trolling, flourishing alt-right subcultures, pervasive cor...
Dealing with the Fs (Fear and Failure)
December 03, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourWelcome to The Academic Life. You are smart and capable, but you aren’t an island, and neither are we. So we reached across our mentor network to bring you podcasts on everything from how to finish that project, to how to take care of your beautiful mind. Wish we’d bring in an expert about something? Email us at [email protected] or [email protected]. Find us on Twitter: The Academic Life @AcademicLifeNBN. In this episode you’ll hear about: board games, Edge House, how to rethink “fail...
Jeremy Snyder, "Exploiting Hope: How the Promise of New Medical Interventions Sustains Us--and Makes Us Vulnerable" (Oxford UP, 2020)
December 01, 2020 09:00 - 55 minutesWe often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations who are preyed upon by someone offering promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned in terms of "exploiting hope." These accusations are made in a range of contexts: human smuggling, employment relationships, unproven medical 'cures.' We hear this concept so often and in so many contexts that, with all its heavy lifting in public discourse, its actual meaning tends to lose focus. Despite its common use...
Amy Bucher, "Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change" (Rosenfeld Media, 2020)
November 27, 2020 09:00 - 36 minutesIn her new book Engaged: Designing for Behavior Change (Rosenfeld Media, 2020), Amy Bucher analyzes both the barriers and levers to achieving behavioral change. Among the barriers are cognitive biases, like a Status Quo Bias, as well as growing both emotionally and mentally exhausted by changes that require too much willpower on behalf of the user. Opportunities to promote change include having accountability buddies to help guide you, and avatars that have proven highly effective in providin...
Frederick Crews, "Freud: The Making of an Illusion" (Picador, 2018)
November 25, 2020 09:00 - 58 minutesThe figure of Sigmund Freud has captivated the Western imagination like few others. One hundred and twenty-five years after the publication of Studies on Hysteria, the good doctor from Vienna continues to stir controversy in institutions, academic circles, and nuclear households across the world. Perhaps Freud’s sharpest and most adamant critic, Frederick Crews has been debating Freud’s legacy for over thirty years. His latest work, Freud: The Making of an Illusion (Picador, 2018) challenges...
Rosamond Rhodes, "The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism" (Oxford UP, 2020)
November 23, 2020 09:00 - 50 minutesCommon morality has been the touchstone of medical ethics since the publication of Beauchamp and Childress's Principles of Biomedical Ethics in 1979. Rosamond Rhodes challenges this dominant view by presenting an original and novel account of the ethics of medicine, one deeply rooted in the actual experience of medical professionals. She argues that common morality accounts of medical ethics are unsuitable for the profession, and inadequate for responding to the particular issues that arise i...
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg, "What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve" (HBR Press, 2020)
November 19, 2020 09:00 - 34 minutesStop Solving the Wrong Problem! In this episode we discuss Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg's book What's Your Problem?: To Solve Your Toughest Problems, Change the Problems You Solve (HBR Press, 2020) and focus on hisRapid Reframing Method for solving in particular people-related problems. Specific topics include: how emotions can either facilitate or hinder the challenging of established mental models, how reframing fits the top 3 skills of importance for the future economy, and why “vagueness” is...
Gina Rippon, "Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020)
November 16, 2020 09:00 - 39 minutesThere is a long history of brain research that seems to legitimize widely held beliefs about the men versus women. According to my guest, much of that research is founded on biases and misguided experiments, which raises the questions: Are there any meaningful neurological differences between men and women? And if so, what are they? To find out, you’ll want to listen to my interview with Dr. Gina Rippon, author of the book, Gender and our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the...
Ido Hartogsohn, "American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century" (MIT Press, 2020)
November 13, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourAre psychedelics invaluable therapeutic medicines, or dangerously unpredictable drugs that precipitate psychosis? Tools for spiritual communion or cognitive enhancers that spark innovation? Activators for one’s private muse or part of a political movement? In the 1950s and 1960s, researchers studied psychedelics in all these incarnations, often arriving at contradictory results. In American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 2020), Ido Hart...
Beth Kurland, "Dancing on the Tightrope: Transcending the Habits of Your Mind and Awakening to Your Fullest Life" (Wellbridge Books, 2018)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 1 hourIf life can feel at times like a challenging tightrope walk, how do we face life's difficulties yet remain resilient and open-hearted? Rather than seeking "perfect" balance, or tiptoeing on our journey, how do we learn to embrace life and "dance," in order to live most fully? In Dancing on the Tightrope: The Transformative Power of Ten Minutes (Wellbridge Books, 2018), clinical psychologist and award-winning author Dr. Beth Kurland reveals five common obstacles--habits of the mind that get i...
Pilar Jennings, "To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power of Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action" (Shambala, 2017)
November 10, 2020 09:00 - 56 minutesEarly on in her clinical practice, psychoanalyst Pilar Jennings was presented with a particularly difficult case: a six-year-old girl who, traumatized by loss, had stopped speaking. Challenged by the limitations of her training to respond effectively to the isolating effect of childhood trauma, Jennings takes the unconventional path of inviting her friend Lama Pema--a kindly Tibetan Buddhist monk who experienced his own life-shaping trauma at a very young age--into their sessions. In the warm...
Jamie Merisotis, "Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines" (RosettaBooks, 2020)
November 05, 2020 10:00 - 34 minutesAre robots going to be our overlords? In Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines (RosettaBooks, 2020), Jamie Merisotis says they don't have to be. We can make them our friends. Jamie Merisotis is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, and public policy. Since 2008, he’s served as president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation committed to making opportunities for learning beyond high school available to all. Jamie previously served as co-founder a...
Hilary Jacobs Hendel, "It’s Not Always Depression" (Random House, 2018)
October 29, 2020 08:00 - 41 minutesDepression and anxiety are not what you think they are, according to my guest. Often thought of as presenting problems in their own right, it might make more sense to think of them as clusters of symptoms deriving from underlying problems knowing and working with our core emotions. In her new book, It’s Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self (2018, Random House), Hilary Jacobs Hendel debunks common m...
Steven H. Knoblauch, "Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity" (Routledge, 2020)
October 27, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesPsychotherapy tends to be thought of as a verbal enterprise, wherein participants speak and construct meaning through words. However, much goes on between patient and therapist at an embodied, nonverbal level that deserves attention. This is the focus of the book Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity (2020, Routledge), written by my guest, Dr. Steven H. Knoblauch. In his new book, he describes the way that cultural meaning can be inscribed and ...
Gina Rippon, "Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds" (Vintage, 2020)
October 27, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourFor decades if not centuries, science has backed up society’s simple dictum that men and women are hardwired differently, that the world is divided by two different kinds of brains—male and female. However, new research in neuroimaging suggests that this is little more than “neurotrash.” In Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds (Vintage, 2020), acclaimed professor of neuroimaging, Gina Rippon, finally challenges this damaging myth by showi...
Marta Zaraska, "Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100" (Appetite/Random House, 2020)
October 26, 2020 08:00 - 41 minutesToday I interview Marta Zaraska about her book Growing Young: How Friendship, Optimism, and Kindness Can Help You Live to 100 (Appetite/Random House, 2020). Now you may be thinking to yourself, “100? I’m not sure how appealing that is.” In our interview, Zaraska has a surprising response for you. And it’s important to say at the outset that Zaraska’s aim isn’t really to show us just how to prolong our years, but to help us understand how every one of our days between now and, if we’re lucky, ...
Robert Plomin, "Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are" (MIT Press, 2019)
October 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHave you ever felt, “Oh my God, I’m turning into my mother (or father)!” ? Robert Plomin explains why that happens in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (MIT Press, 2019). A century of genetic research shows that DNA differences inherited from our parents are the consistent lifelong sources of our psychological individuality―the blueprint that makes us who we are. Robert Plomin’s decades of work demonstrate that genetics explains more about the psychological differences among people than ...
Michael E. McCullough, "The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code" (Basic Books, 2020)
October 22, 2020 08:00 - 35 minutesWhy Give a Damn About Strangers? In his book The Kindness of Strangers: How a Selfish Ape Invented a New Moral Code (Basic Books, 2020), Michael E. McCullough explains. McCullough is a professor of psychology at the University of California San Diego, where he directs the Evolution and Human Behavior laboratory. Long interested in prosocial behavior and morality, he’s conducted research on forgiveness, revenge, gratitude, empathy, altruism, and religion. His other books include Beyond Revenge...
Li Zhang, "Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy" (U California Press, 2020)
October 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Faced with increasing market-driven competition and profound social changes, more and more middle-class urbanites are turning to Western-style psychological counseling to grapple with their mental distress. Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (University of California Press, 2020) offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an un...
William P. Seeley, "Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 12, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourHow do we distinguish art from non-art artifacts, and what does cognitive science have to do with it? In Attentional Engines: A Perceptual Theory of the Arts (Oxford University Press, 2020), William Seeley offers a cognitive science-based account of how we engage with art, what it is that artworks do, and what artists do to make sure they do it. In his diagnostic recognition framework for locating art, artworks are communicative devices in which artists embed perceptual cues that enable the p...
Kat Arney, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 50 minutesWe gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be even more powerful: the way we speak. As the pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You (HMH, 2020), the way we talk is central to our social identity because our speech largely reflects the voices we heard as childre...
Tamara McClintock Greenberg, "Treating Complex Trauma: Combined Theories and Methods" (Springer, 2020)
October 09, 2020 08:00 - 41 minutesRelationship problems, struggles with substance abuse, poor memory, and difficulties with emotions are typical symptoms of complex trauma—yet many traumatized individuals have no idea their symptoms share a common cause. Research shows that treating one’s underlying traumatic experiences can yield immense relief from such symptoms and liberate individuals to live freer, more satisfying lives. This has been the focus of Dr. Tamara McClintock Greenberg’s work for 30 years, as she documents in h...
Chris Heffer, "All Bullshit and Lies?: Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 08, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe implied answer to the titular question of All Bullshit and Lies? (Oxford University Press 2020) is no, it’s not. In this book, subtitled Insincerity, Irresponsibility, and the Judgment of Untruthfulness, Chris Heffer argues that to analyze untruthfulness, we need a framework which goes beyond these two kinds of speech acts, bullshitting and lying. With his TRUST framework (Trust-related Untruthfulness in Situated Text), Heffer analyzes untruthfulness which includes irresponsible attitudes...
David Barash, "Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 43 minutesWhat are the similar ways in which animals and people try to intimidate others? In his new book, Threats: Intimidation and Its Discontents (Oxford UP, 2020), David Barash explains. Barash is a research scientist and writer who spent 43 years as a professor of psychology at the University of Washington. He’s authored over 240 peer-reviewed scientific papers, and authored or co-authored 41 books. Among his awards is being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
Eric Weiner, "The Geography of Genius: Lessons from the World’s Most Creative Places" (Simon and Schuster, 2016)
October 07, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesLiving, as we do, in a time in which a U.S. president anoints himself “a very stable genius”, we are particularly appreciative of Eric Weiner, a former foreign correspondent for NPR who writes with humility and humor, as he brings us along with him on his travels to times and places that produced genius. Beginning with Athens in the Golden age, and ending with Palo Alto in the Silicon age, Weiner steps lightly through a most serious and fascinating topic, aided and supplemented with the lates...
Berit Brogaard, "Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion" (Oxford UP, 2020)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 39 minutesWhat is it that makes hatred so addicting? In her new book Hatred: Understanding Our Most Dangerous Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2020), Berit Bogaard explains. Berit is a Professor of Philosophy and a Cooper Fellow at the University of Miami. Her areas of research include the topics of perception, emotions, and language. She’s published five books, four with Oxford University Press over the past decade, plus The Superhuman Mind, published by Penguin in 2015. Topics covered in this episod...
Frans de Waal, "Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves" (Norton, 2019)
October 01, 2020 08:00 - 59 minutesMama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves (W. W. Norton & Company) is a fascinating exploration of the rich emotional lives of animals, beginning with Mama, a chimpanzee matriarch who formed a deep bond with biologist Jan van Hooff. Her story and others like it—from dogs “adopting” the injuries of their companions, to rats helping fellow rats in distress, to elephants revisiting the bones of their loved ones—show that humans are not the only species with the capac...
Wendy Wood, "Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes That Stick" (FSG, 2019)
September 28, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourToday's guest is psychologist and behavioral scientist, Wendy Wood. She is currently a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, and a visiting professor at the INSEAD Business School in Paris. Wendy has spent much of her career studying what she considers the very building blocks of behavioral change, something we all know as habits. Angela Duckworth describes her as “the world's foremost expert in the field.” And according to Adam Grant, she is “widely r...
Dr. Christopher Harris on Teaching Neuroscience
September 24, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourDr. Christopher Harris (@chrisharris) is a neuroscientist, engineer and educator at the EdTech company Backyard Brains. He is principal investigator on an NIH-funded project to develop brain-based robots for neuroscience education. In their recent open-access research paper, Dr. Harris and his team describe, and present results from, their classroom-based pilots of this new and highly innovative approach to neuroscience and STEM education. They argue that neurorobotics has enormous potential ...
Timothy R. Clark, "The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation" (Berrett-Koehler, 2020)
September 24, 2020 08:00 - 40 minutesHow does any organization invite the true, full participation of its members? In his new book The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety: Defining the Path to Inclusion and Innovation (Berrett-Koehler, 2020), Timothy Clark explains. Clark is the founder and CEO of LeaderFactor, and ranks as a global authority on senior executive development, strategy acceleration and organizational change. He’s the author of five book, and over 150 articles. Clark earned a doctorate degree in Social Science from Ox...
Linville Meadows, "A Spiritual Pathway to Recovery from Addiction: A Physician’s Journey of Discovery" (The Meadows Farm, 2020)
September 23, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesAddiction occurs among physicians at the same rate as in the general population, about 10%. Unlike the general population, however, an intensive rehabilitation program, geared specifically for their profession, vastly improves their chances of finding long-term sobriety. Over 70% of these physicians will be clean and sober-and practicing medicine-five years later. How is this achieved, and can these principles be applied to anyone? A Spiritual Pathway to Recovery from Addiction: A Physician’s...
Diana Greene Foster, "The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion" (Scribner, 2020)
September 22, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourWhat happens when a woman seeking an abortion is turned away? Diana Greene Foster, PhD, decided to find out. With a team of scientists—psychologists, epidemiologists, demographers, nursing scholars, and public health researchers—she set out to discover the effect of receiving versus being denied an abortion on women’s lives. Over the course of a ten-year investigation that began in 2007, she and her team followed a thousand women from more than twenty states, some of whom received their abort...
Robert Kolker, "Hidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family" (Doubleday, 2020)
September 21, 2020 08:00 - 46 minutesHidden Valley Road: Inside The Mind of An American Family (Doubleday, 2020) is the story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1...
Sue Stuart-Smith, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature (Scribner, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourSue Stuart-Smith, who is a distinguished psychiatrist and avid gardener, offers an inspiring and consoling work about the healing effects of gardening and its ability to decrease stress and foster mental well-being in our everyday lives. The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the earth we connect with the cycle of life in nature through which destruction and decay are followed by regro...
David Livingstone Smith, "On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It" (Oxford UP, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourThe Rwandan genocide, the Holocaust, the lynching of African Americans, the colonial slave trade: these are horrific episodes of mass violence spawned from racism and hatred. We like to think that we could never see such evils again--that we would stand up and fight. But something deep in the human psyche--deeper than prejudice itself--leads people to persecute the other: dehumanization, or the human propensity to think of others as less than human. An award-winning author and philosopher, Sm...
Joseph E. Davis, "Chemically Imbalanced: Everyday Suffering, Medication, and Our Troubled Quest for Self-Mastery" (U Chicago Press, 2020)
September 18, 2020 08:00 - 58 minutesEveryday suffering—those conditions or feelings brought on by trying circumstances that arise in everyone’s lives—is something that humans have grappled with for millennia. But the last decades have seen a drastic change in the way we approach it. In the past, a person going through a time of difficulty might keep a journal or see a therapist, but now the psychological has been replaced by the biological: instead of treating the heart, soul, and mind, we take a pill to treat the brain. Chemic...
Nick Chater, "The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain" (Yale UP, 2019)
September 17, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourPsychologists and neuroscientists struggle with how best to interpret human motivation and decision making. The assumption is that below a mental “surface” of conscious awareness lies a deep and complex set of inner beliefs, values, and desires that govern our thoughts, ideas, and actions, and that to know this depth is to know ourselves. In the The Mind Is Flat: The Remarkable Shallowness of the Improvising Brain (Yale UP, 2019), behavioural scientist Nick Chater contends just the opposite: ...
Katherine Kinzler, "How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You" (HMH, 2020)
September 11, 2020 08:00 - 52 minutesWe gravitate toward people like us; it's human nature. Race, class, and gender shape our social identities, and thus who we perceive as "like us" or "not like us". But one overlooked factor can be even more powerful: the way we speak. As the pioneering psychologist Katherine Kinzler reveals in How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do - And What It Says About You (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), the way we talk is central to our social identity because our speech largely reflects the voices we ...
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga, "NeuroScience Fiction" (Benbella Books, 2020)
September 10, 2020 08:00 - 1 hourIn NeuroScience Fiction (Benbella Books, 2020), Rodrigo Quian Quiroga shows how the outlandish premises of many seminal science fiction movies are being made possible by new discoveries and technological advances in neuroscience and related fields. Along the way, he also explores the thorny philosophical problems raised as a result, diving into Minority Report and free will, The Matrix and the illusion of reality, Blade Runner and android emotion, and more. A heady mix of science fiction, neu...