Categories: psychology

Why, of course. (I think.)

I read a book called “On Being Certain” by Richard Burton (a college professor at Yale, not the dead actor) on a plane ride back from Paris recently, an environment that always encourages freedom of thought. I’m a voracious consumer of laymen’s books on recent advances in neuroscience, so I was familiar with all the authors he noted (including Stephen Jay Gould – another favorite of mine.) I’m also interested in physics, in particular quantum mechanics. And chaos theory. More >>

Made You Blink

If you work in the communications business, and you haven’t read “Blink” yet by Malcolm Gladwell, you better think about grabbing a copy to take along on vacation. Gladwell may have coined a contemporary term with “The Tipping Point,” a very good book, but for my money “Blink” offers even more potent observations on brain function, ones that are highly relevant to what we do around here to make a living.More >>

Rules to live by

Don't buy a vintage British sports car. They smell great and emit a sexy burble from the exhaust that Mazda spent millions recreating for the Miata. Unfortunately, they have to be running to hear that sound, which if you own one you'll learn is an iffy proposition. Take the money you'd spend fixing up a car that will inevitably break your heart and use it to buy a gigantic moose head for above the mantelpiece in your living room. It's just as foolhardy, but you'll never have to change the oil or have it towed back home from your cousin's barbecue. More >>

An irrational belief in rationality.

Paul Krugman and I don’t often see eye to eye. I know he’s won a Nobel Prize, and gets to write a column for the New York Times and all that. But he can really bum me out. He’s so tireless in pointing out everything that’s wrong with our economic system, you’d think whatever prosperity that system has created over the last two decades was just an inevitability, made less so by the tragic flaws in the system itself. More >>

Culture & gravity

I've come to believe that culture is at once the most powerful, and least easily perceived, influencer of human behavior. Like gravity, which is one of the four fundamental forces controlling the universe, culture is an all-pervasive web of attraction that invisibly holds everything together. (For those who are counting, the other physical forces are the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force and electromagnetism.) Gravity is the weakest of the four forces in its local effects, yet it protects all matter and energy everywhere in the universe from disintegration and chaos. Gravity also, like culture, operates over great distance, though its influence diminishes as the distance grows (and the gravitational pull of other bodies take hold.) More >>

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