Grandparents should give this a read, too.

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In February 1985, a 29-year-old woman from Tokyo's Suginami neighborhood sent a letter to the Japanese magazine Book Magazine. "I'm not sure why," she wrote, "but since about two or three years ago, whenever I go to a bookstore I am struck by an urge to move my bowels." — Read the rest

The post In 1985, a Japanese woman wrote a letter about bookstores making her need to use the bathroom. It…

A study published in Neuroscience by researchers at Spain's University of Zaragoza scanned the brains of 100 young adults and found structural differences in those who hold authoritarian beliefs — on both the left and the right. Right-wing authoritarians had lower grey matter volume in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in understanding other people's thoughts and perspectives.…

Your walking speed says a lot about your character.

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Where we go when we go to sleep and why we go there is one of the great mysteries of the mind. Why the mind at times refuses to go there, despite the pleading and bargaining of its conscious owner, is a greater mystery still. We know that ever since REM evolved in the bird brain, the third of our lives we spend sleeping and dreaming has been a crucible of our capacity for learning, emotional…

"The meaning of life... clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love."

The classic bat-and-ball problem has been studied endlessly.

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"We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leaving and letting go."

It is not merely a matter of growing bones and growing responsibilities, this business of growing up, this unfinishable project of becoming ourselves. It is less like the evolutionary diagram of the upright ape than like a Russian nesting doll, our prior selves not outgrown but integrated, forever dwelling inside the person walking this world today. One measure of maturity — perhaps the purest…

"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."

"We need detachment... as much as we need engagement in our lives... transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear."

A paper about the effects of generative AI use on confidence in work tasks is under investigation after critics raised questions about the study design, data analysis and ethics approval for the research. The study, published in April in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, included 1,923 adults recruited online from the United States and Canada to … Continue reading Journal investigating paper on…

Your brain is not trying to sabotage you. It is trying to protect what it already knows. Learn how to teach it a better future, in this new excerpt from Dr. Deepika Chopra's book _, The Power of Real Optimism_.

"My life... runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this moment."

The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and time — and yet we spend our lives obviating the fact that we are mortal. If we are lucky enough, if we are lucid enough, it may take us less than a lifetime to learn that to deny death is to deny life. Rilke…

"While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity."

"Our very life here depends directly on continuous acts of beginning."

Women’s faces scored higher worldwide.

"Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world."

today i am reading from my 2020 article denial & acknowledgement which is an academic article about the dynamic between so-called ‘victim’ & ‘perpetrator’ which more often than not are one & the same person. i continue to discuss the importance of acknowledging this toxic division & labeling by the ruling class, who use it […]

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the measure of an unwasted life is not what outlives it but how it was lived — how much integrity and authenticity and creative…

"To forgive is to assume a larger identity than the person who was first hurt.”

"I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time."

"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."

In the fall of 2024, Matt Williams was grading papers at Massey University in New Zealand when he noticed something off in a study one of his students had cited. The study, published in 2016, reported overwhelming evidence suggesting that eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or EMDR, is an effective treatment for depression. But the … Continue reading Journal retracts depression…

It seems odd, wrong even, that “patience” and “passion” — the twin roots of love — should share a root in pāti, Latin for “to suffer.” But anyone who has lived, who has loved unskillfully or loved the unskilled, knows that the experience can be our sharpest instrument of suffering. We say we “fall” in love precisely because we know we can get bruised, know that the trap door it opens beneath our…

"Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined."

"Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds."

Breakfast Babble is ED’s own little space on the interwebs where we gather to discuss ideas and get pumped up (or not) for the day. We judge things, too. Sometimes. Always. Whatever, call it catharsis and join in, people. I am convinced that if overthinking were a sport, I’d be absolutely unbeatable. And I don’t […]

The trope of the “kindhearted simpleton” is well established in American culture. Sometimes referred to as “Dumb Is Good” by television insiders, characters who fit the trope range from Forrest Gump, to Woody from Cheers to every movie in the Ernest Goes franchise. Each iteration reinforces the idea that the emptier the head, the happier […]

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